Please Steal This Book

Well, not quite. You are free to give this book away, or resell it, as you wish. However, the entire text must be left intact.

 

Copyright 2007 XOR Career Guides

All Rights Reserved. No part may be duplicated or distributed without express written permission. This report is an original creation of XOR Career Guides, and is not a part of any affiliate or associate distribution plan. Rights to distribution of this report should not be implied or conferred. Information in this report should not be construed as legal or accounting advice. Keywords: business, success, wealth, money, finance, rich, investments, real estate, stock. This report is for information use only and is not intended to provide investment advice. Concepts and ideas depicted in this report should be used at the reader’s discretion. Use due diligence in all of your investment decisions.

“Wealth to us is not mere material for vainglory but an opportunity for achievement; and poverty we think it no disgrace to acknowledge but a real degradation to make no effort to overcome.”

Thucydides

 

Wealth in America

 

As a lifelong entrepreneur, I have learned that following a few basic principles can dramatically increase your probability of achieving success.

A principle is a basic truth or law, which cannot be refuted by opinion, personal bias, or peer pressure. Principles also tend to come off as

preachy, so bear with me; and remember, entrepreneurs are usually thick skinned and responsive to advice that may benefit them.

Welcome to the Creating Wealth Boot Camp Newsletter!

You can subscribe to my free weekly newsletter by sending a blank email to wealthbootcamp-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Or, you can do a search at Yahoo Groups for Creating Wealth Boot Camp.
It's almost a cliche. The image of military boot camp as a living nightmare has been immortalized by countless Hollywood productions and oft retold war stories by military veterans. From my own experience I can tell you, boot camp can be a living nightmare.

And that's how I feel about poverty and living paycheck to paycheck--it's a living nightmare.

What's worse, is that it doesn't have to be that way. We live in the best of times, and the economic opportunities available to us today are light years ahead of what our parents experienced.

Look around. Find an opportunity that matches your personal interests, skills, and income goals, and then give it your 100% best effort.

Financial success in your own home business may be just around the corner. But you don't have to take my word for it. Read some books by people like Robert Kiyosaki, David Bach, Suze Orman, and Steve Scott. They will all tell you the same thing: "To get ahead in life, you need to own your own business."

Ron Taylor
Making Massive Amounts of Money on the Net www.5grandmonthly.com

Achieving wealth in America is not about how much you earn, but how wisely you use what you earn. This report is aimed at helping you to both increase your income, and manage your money properly. Among other things, you will learn that spending more than you earn in an effort to impress friends and neighbors with your material possessions is a recipe for financial disaster.

Additionally, lacking the patience to invest for the long-term, develop action oriented goal statements, and failing to protect yourself with proper insurance and legal advice, are all indicators of poor financial management. Again, it’s not what you earn, but what you do with it that matters.

Popular opinion has taught us that wealth and success comes to those who are lucky, or cheats. I hope this report will show you that this is not true.

One standard measurement of wealth is a six-figure income, which pertains to the number of digits in your annual income. A six-figure income equals anything above $100,000. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2004, the number of households with income between $100,000 and $149,999 exceeded 11 million, 3.5 million American households had income between $150,000 and $199,999, 1.3 million households had incomes between $200,000 and $249,999, and 1.7 million households had income above $250,000 per year.

Unfortunately, the wealth of America cannot simply be measured by income.

According to an article written by David Francis and published in the May 23, 2005 edition of Christian ScienceMonitor ,nearly 20% of American households have either zero net worth, or actually owe more than they are worth. Furthermore, according to Francis, 25% of American households do not have sufficient cash reserves or other assets to support themselves above the poverty line for three months, and 33% of households do not even have an active bank account.

What ever happened to the land of opportunity? Americans are killing themselves with uncontrolled spending, easy credit, and a complete lack of budgeting or saving skills.

So how does one measure wealth? And, when does a person know if he or she has achieved “wealth?” For the purposes of this report, wealth is defined as an income level derived from passive sources that allows you to live without depnding on a job. Passive sources are any income source that throws off a positive cash flow, that you can bank or spend.

For example, the cash left over from a rental property after all expenses are paid, is passive income. Likewise, interest from a certificate of deposit, or dividends from stock investments, are examples of passive income. With this definition in mind, the key to creating wealth is to figure out how to create and build passive income sources. To measure my progress in this area, I use a simple formula:

Passive income/total living expenses = wealth quotient

Consider this example: If you had $1,200 per month in passive income from a real estate investment and your cash savings account, and $4,500 in monthly expenses to survive (house payment, household expenses, etc), your wealth quotient equals:

1,200/4,500 = .26 The ideal is to achieve a quotient of 1 or greater. The number .26 represents approximately one quarter of your desired quotient of 1 or greater. Change the numbers and watch what happens:

3,000/4,500 = .66

 

4,500/4,500 = 1

 

6,000/4,500 = 1.33

The key to long term financial success is to build passive income, and free yourself from the need to work or “earn” a living. In my opinion, when your wealth quotient reaches 1, you have achieved wealth. The rest is simply a matter of how much margin for safety and extra luxuries you wish to obtain.

Keep in mind that passive and portfolio income is typically earned from fully insured and maintained real estate that provides a positive cash flow, bonds and savings, dividends from Blue Chip stocks, and royalties from books, patents, and music you may own the rights to.

These rights to intellectual property, combined with the equity in real estate owned and various certificates of deposit, stocks, and bonds compsrises what is known as you capital base. As your capital base grows, you are able to generate greater amounts of passive and portfolio income (PPI). When your PPI exceeds your basic living expenses, you have achieved a level of wealth that enables you to make riskier investments in the pursuit of higher yields and return on investment (ROI).

The key here, which is a lesson I learned from both “The Richest Man in Babylon” and the school of hard knocks, is not to erode your capital base by making risky investments or spending the money that makes up the foundation to your wealth building aspirations. As my rough sketches illustrate, you should use only the proceeds above and beyond your basic living expenses (derived from your capital base) to make wealth building investments and/or purchase the goodies in life.

If you violate this rule and consistently dip into your capital, you will need to keep your day job to feed your consumption habits.

I am not in any way advocating a Spartan lifestyle—after all, the pursuit of wealth is only worthwhile if you are allowed to enjoy a higher quality of life for yourself and your family. The basic tenet of this report is that you should carefully manage your money to ensure your investment and wealth building goals are heading in the right direction.

In the short term this may mean cutting back on the niceties, but the rewards later on will allow you to enjoy the good things in life above and beyond the norm. Robert Allen makes this point perfectly clear in his book, “Nothing Down,” where he compares your pursuit of wealth to a rocket ship leaving earth towards space.

In the early stages, just after liftoff, your progress is slow and awkward, but as you gain experience and continue to build your capital base, your rocketship gains speed until it begins to break free of the earth’s gravitational pull. Allen’s analogy is a great lesson in wealth building and is well worth reading.

Again, this concept is vitally important to your acquisition of wealth. Follow the steps of creating multiple streams of income that ideally throw off positive cashflow to your hip pocket with minimal effort. These streams of income typically should come from interest from savings accounts, dividends from bond and stock investments, royalties from intellectual properties (copyrights, patents, and trademarks), and rental income from real estate owned.

Use this positve cashflow to offset your living expenses, then use the excess (income above and beyond your living expenses) to feed your investment activities. When your wealth quotient exceeds 1, you have achieved a moderate level of wealth.

Other definitions of wealth consider income, where an annual income equal to or greater than 1 million dollars constitutes wealth. Using the net worth criteria alone, 3% of American households qualify as “wealthy.” According to recent studies of millionaires in America, most millionaires (million dollar net worth) live by modest means, drive non-luxury cars, and do not own luxury homes.

Wealthy Americans are generally professionals such as attorneys, surgeons, and scientists, with the entrepreneurial group gaining ground. A great book to read on this subject is TheMillionaire

NextDoor,by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko.

Various consumer watch groups and the U.S. Census Bureau estimate there were 8.2 million millionaire households in the United States in 2003, much of which was realized through high home values. Robert Kiyosaki does not allow the inclusion of personal residences in his calculations of net worth in his Rich

Dad, P oorDadbook series, preferring to limit such calculations to investment property, liquid assets, and businesses owned or controlled.
Using his definiiton of wealth, the number of milionaire status households in America would be significantly lower.

Use the tables below to find where you fit in the overall scheme of wealth and income in America, based on your age and ethnicity. While comparisons of such numbers mean little on the individual level, it is interesting to see where you fit.

Median Income of Households by Selected Characteristics

Number Median Characteristic (thousands)income All households 113,146 $44,389 Type of household

Family households 77,010 55,327 Married-couple families 58,109 63,813 Female householder, no
husband present 14,009 29,826 Male householder, no
wife present 4,893 44,923 Nonfamily households 36,136 26,176 Female householder 19,792 21,797 Male householder 16,344 31,967

Race and Hispanic origin of householder White 92,702 46,697
Non-Hispanic 81,445 48,977
Black 13,792 $30,134 Asian and Pacific Islander4,140 57,518
Hispanic origin 12,181 34,241
Age of householder
15–24 6,686 27,586
25–34 19,255 45,485
35–44 23,226 56,785
Number Median Age of householder (thousands)income 45–54 23,370 61,111 55–64 17,476 50,400
65 and over 23,135 24,509

Wealth, Warren Buffett Style

Warren Buffett once stated “It is easier to createmoney than it is to spend it.” The operative word in this statement is his use of the word “create.” By create, Buffett does not mean to make or earn money. Creating wealth is not about getting a second job or negotiating a pay raise, although these things can certainly help in the beginning stages of wealth building.

Creating wealth is about finding ways to preserve the money you do earn, putting it to proper use, and learning how to develop income sources from outside your normal day job, as discussed in the section above.

Warren Buffett created his billion-dollar empire by investing in companies and adding value to their product or service. As a beginning wealth builder you can similarly add value to the enterprises you undertake by producing a better product, marketing your services more effectively, and making wise investments in real estate, stocks, bonds, and intellectual properties.
Another quote from Warren Buffett illustrates his philosophy towards investing. Buffet states: “I don’t try to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.” This is an interesting strategy that you will see over and over in creating wealth and investment success type books.

Essentially, Buffett is telling you not to overwhelm yourself with the need to hit a homerun every time you step up to bat. A steady stream of singles wins games. From an investment or business startup perspective, this means you don’t have to bet the entire farm on one deal, nor do you have to make a million on your next stock market investment. This philosophy is echoed throughout this report, where I implore you to think big, but to also think in terms of small successes repeated over and over. Again, if you can make a hundred bucks doing something within your current capabilities and resources, could you repeat it? Creating wealth can be that simple.

Donald Trump is an excellent example of this numbers game. While he came from a long line of successful entrepreneurs, Trump can be considered a self-made billionaire. In his book “Think Like a Billionaire,” Trump outlines his strategy for success.

One of his key points that most self-made men and women can relate to is the need to go it alone. Aside from the investor and lender support you will need along the way (which you will pay for in the form of interest and dividends), the process of creating personal wealth is a solitary one. Nobody cares about your finances quite as much as you. Nobody will hand you an empire. And nobody will sell you a thriving business. Creating personal wealth is up to you.
It’s up to you to take a lump of clay, known as an idea, and shape it into something valuable.

Fortunately, we live in a society that rewards ingenuity, hard work, and perseverance. Use the ideas in this report to jumpstart your financial education and start the potter’s wheel turning in your direction. I had to learn these lessons the hard way, as I will show you in the next section.

Work Sucks!

 

Go to school, get a job, retire broke. What a vicious cycle. Would you like to:

Make real money?
Get out of debt?
Take more time off work? Retire early—with money? Buy a house?
Maybe even get rich?

Your job will never help you achieve any of these things. Sorry to clue you in to this sad little fact, but your job is not the answer to these questions. Let’s be frank—your job sucks!

But, for a few of us with a little initiative and a bit of vision, a home-based business may be the answer to those questions above.

By now you’re probably thinking you don’t have the business skills to be successful, or you don’t want to have to sell things. Hah, if you work at the mall or at the local fast food outlet, you sell things—only for somebody else. As for business skills, who gives a flip; business majors are not brain surgeons—or even educators for that matter. I know, because I was one.

My degree landed me an assistant manager’s job at a hamburger joint you would know well, where I proceeded to waste six of the best years of my life. I told you I was stupid. It took me six years to find the exit.

As an Internet surfer and blogger you know a lot about business and social networking. Business is about creating relationships with people, and using your natural skills to make friends and maintain online relationships. Believe it or not, you have the ability to create a highly successful online business—starting from where you are at today.

Why let this natural talent and free resource waste away while you think about applying to flip burgers down the street? Forget it.

Working for the man is for losers too ugly or socially inept to make a friend. Who’s the man? He’s the guy that strolls into the store once or twice a week to pick up the bank bag you filled.

Do you know how to make friends, or maintain positive relationships with others? These are the basic skills of entrepreneurs. And the nice thing about being your own boss is spending time doing the things you want to do, in the way you want to do them, rather than sweating over a hot grill flipping burgers for minimum wage while some guy who barely speaks English tells you you’re doing it wrong.

Get real. There’s more to life. Starting today, resolve to learn more about starting and operating a home business—preferably with your computer. Start putting your natural skills to work to create your own business. You can thank me later.

Fired Temp Worker Gets Revenge!

 

Temping ain’t easy.

 

Trust me. I learned this lesson after leaving an exciting career in the fast food industry.

You work for minimum wage. Get the worse job assignments in the company. And, you can be replaced without justification at a moment’s notice.

In three years of temping, I did not accrue a minute of vacation time, or a dime’s worth of medical insurance. I shoveled cattle feed in the morning and its inevitable by-product in the evening, cleaned toxic waste filters the full-time employees wouldn’t touch, and chased bats from an attic that I honestly believe was haunted by the tormented soul of a betrayed mistress. Like I said, temping ain’t easy.

But it was work. Honest work that put food on the table and paid the rent. And that’s about all it did.

Have you ever heard the expression, “living paycheck to paycheck?” During those three years I was the poster boy for living paycheck to paycheck. I don’t mean to bad mouth the entire temp industry. Temporary service agencies provide a valuable service for both employers and job hunters, and I’ve heard that some even offer bennies. But I don’t believe it was meant to serve as a long-term solution for anybody with an ounce of ambition.

To make a dreadfully long story short, I eventually got fed up with the nonsense and told one of my temp bosses what I thought of him and his haunted attic. Two minutes later I was being escorted off the property by a security guard—a temp worker himself if I remember correctly.

So after six years in fast food and three years in the temp business, it finally began to dawn on me that making the same mistakes over and over was not only proof of my thick skulled mentality, it was also proof that you cannot get ahead working to help somebody else achieve his or her goals.

Lately I have learned three important lessons from people like Robert Kiyosaki, Suze Orman, and David Bach. While each of these writers is unique, they all basically say the same thing:

Learn to spend less than you earn.
Buy appreciable assets that produce a positive cash flow. And, find a way to create multiple streams of income.

One of the best ways I know of to achieve these three points is to own and operate your own business. Now this isn’t rocket science, and it doesn’t take the Bank of Switzerland, or an SBA loan for that matter, to get started. All it takes is a little initiative, sprinkled with a healthy dose of persistence, patience, and promotion. Take it from me, a small business gives you the ability to make money, build a residual income, and perhaps create wealth.
So, what was my revenge? Success. I left the temp business and started my own home-based business. Now I do the hiring and firing. Su-weet.

The 3 Ps Of Business Success

Before you race off to start your own business, let me give you three words of advice: persistence, patience, and promotion. These three words form the foundation to any business success.

Woody Allen was fond of saying “90% of success is showing up.” In business this can be interpreted to mean that joining or starting a business, versus not starting one at all, is the foundation for success. Obviously, if you never get around to starting a business, you can’t succeed in building a business. But the concept of persistence goes beyond just starting a business. True success lies in overcoming obstacles, learning from your mistakes, and never quitting.

To help you persevere in the face of adversity, it helps to be patient. Patience is definitely a virtue in the business community, as not everyone will see your vision, or rush to support your dreams of empire building. Knowing this upfront, it is easier to shrug off rejection, find ways around obstacles, and weather the storms of cash flow problems. Patience truly is the cornerstone of any success, as most legitimate business endeavors take time to develop and mature.

The third leg of your business success is the fuel that propels your business forward. Promotion is the art of sharing your business opportunity, product, or service with prospects. While the persistence and patience may be defined as character traits, your willingness and ability to promote is a learned skill. You need to study the marketplace, particularly your industry to know what works and what doesn’t. Try not to re-invent the wheel here. As a business startup you probably won’t have the budget to roll out risky promotional campaigns. Start small, copy the leaders in your industry, and never be shy about testing or tweaking your promotional packages.

In the end, successful business owners have proven themselves through a keen awareness of how persistence, patience, and promotion can build a cash machine.

Creating Wealthy Habits

 

One of the wealthiest men in America, John Jacob Astor, once stated, “Wealth is largely a result of habit.”

Astor created his wealth during the Industrial Revolution, yet his message as just as true today as it was then. In my opinion, Astor’s quote may also apply to poverty, or just getting by in life. Sadly, the truth ain’t always pretty, but here it is:

Where you are at today is the result of habit.

To achieve financial wealth you need to take an objective look at your habits. Are you in the habit of spending more than you earn? Or, are you in the habit of tucking a piece of each paycheck into a savings account or investment? The habit of saving is the bedrock to financial success, so much so that W. Clement Stone claimed your ability to save is a prerequisite to creating personal wealth. Buying things that you don’t need that always depreciate in value, such as a new car, recreational vehicle, or the latest and greatest living room furniture. Robert Kiyosaki referred to these things as “doodads” in his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

Wealth Killers: Failing to recognize or acknowledge the power of the Internet to help you create additional income, and squandering your hard-earned money on things or recreational activities that provide instant gratification while ignoring the long-term implications of not investing for the future.

Wealthy people make creating wealth a priority in their lives. They accept personal responsibility for their success, create goals, and use money to build businesses, support charities, and enjoy life.

You could argue that the wealthy were lucky enough to be born into a wealthy family, but the statistics state otherwise. Only 15% of the wealthy households in America attribute their wealth to inheritances. That means 85% of the wealthy population earned their wealth through hard work, wise investments, and successful businesses. In a sense they found something that worked and repeated it over and over—kind of like a habit, you might say.

Wealthy people habitually do those things that create wealth. You can join this elite group by developing new habits, such as starting a home-based business using the power of the Internet. Today you have access to the most powerful marketing system in the history of humankind—the Internet. Using the Internet and exploring sights such as the one listed in my bio, entrepreneurs have literally gone from rags to riches overnight.
Change your habits and change your financial future.

To Create Wealth You Gotta Be In the Game

 

There is a famous quote by Theodore Roosevelt that you may be familiar with. Roosevelt said:

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

In my opinion Roosevelt’s quote captures the spirit and tenacity of the home-based entrepreneur. We are not happy on the sidelines, watching as others achieve success. Nor are we swayed by the risk of failure, because we know that the potential rewards far outweigh the risks.

As Roosevelt’s quote also suggests, the road may not always be smooth. In fact, sometimes the road to success is “checkered by failure.” It’s at those times that the measure of a person’s determination is taken. There’s no such thing as an easy road to wealth. However, if you combine persistence, patience, and promotion with a legitimate opportunity, your odds of achieving success are greatly increased.

Challenge yourself to not be counted among the ranks of those “who neither enjoy much nor suffer much.” You’ve taken the bold steps to join a home-based opportunity, now I invite you to consider ways you can promote your business. Lately I have been using an autoresponder available at www.getresponse.com. Building an opt-in list is a slow process, but you have to start somewhere. You can also look at setting up a blog at www.blogger.com. It’s free, and the html editor feature even allows you to post banners inside your blog. You can also of course post free blogs at Myspace. If you edit your blog header, you can have an banner that promotes your business on every page of your MySpace blog. One technique I recommend is to not even talk about your business opportunity in your blog. Simply conclude each blog entry with a signature file that includes your name and business referral link.

Speaking of links, I have recently purchased several domain names at www.godaddy.com. Each name costs about $9 per year. You don’t have to have the domain hosted, or spend time trying to build or maintain a website. Simply forward, or redirect, traffic from that domain name to your business link. For example, I own the domain name www.5grandmonthly.com. I now use that address in most of my ads. This gives my ads a bit of uniqueness, and eliminates any stigma that may be associated with “affiliate” type links.

As for free classified ads, there is only one place where I have received positive results, and that’s www.craigslist.org. I highly recommend you take a look at this service. Craigslist is one of the top ranked websites on the Internet. Depending on what city you select to advertise in, your ad could potentially be seen by thousands—all free. Craigslist is picky about how you word your ad, so you may have to experiment a bit. The best thing to do is browse similar ads and see how other people have written theirs.

I encourage you to re-read Roosevelt’s quote and think about how important it is to be in the game if you expect to win.

 

Four Trends That Can Make You Wealthy

The wealthiest people in the world acquired their wealth through a careful recognition and exploitation of a major trend. For example, Bill Gates took advantage of the birth of personal computers and made billions by marketing software that enabled people to use their computer. Sam Walton took advantage of a trend in retail sales and developed a self-service, discount department store concept that became Wal-Mart.

We are at the brink of four major trends. These trends are the Internet, the aging of the world’s populati