Our Book Proposal for Straight Talk: Making an Informed Choice About Network Marketing is ready and the query letters are starting to go out. Mike Ray and I are looking for a literary agent with an interest in Business and Personal Development to represent us in the market place.
Query Letter and Book Proposal are available on request.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Bea Arthur dies at 86
This is a sharp departure from my usual posts. Beatrice Arthur has passed away.
This is a great little article in the LA Times. Here is the link:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/04/beatrice-arthur-thank-you-for-being-a-friend.html
This is a great little article in the LA Times. Here is the link:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/04/beatrice-arthur-thank-you-for-being-a-friend.html
The Great 401K Experiment and 16 Strategies for Creating Wealth
You have been diligently saving into your 401K looking forward to funding your retirement. You are 57 years old and you open your statement. You’ve lost half of your retirement investment. Suddenly retirement has been pushed back beyond age 65 and you are facing the prospect of having a part-time job when you retire. You have been diligently saving into your 529 college plan. Junior is about to turn 18 and instead of the one hundred thousand dollars you expected based on what you were told were the historic returns of the market, you have less than half of that. Now you have to have the conversation with Junior, valedictorian of his class, about going to the Junior College.
What if the first thing that your financial planner told you after the usual obligatory greeting was that you were about to embark on a great experiment? That experiment would require you to set a consistent amount of money aside for 30 years in a lock box controlled by investment banks and the United States Federal Government, limit your investment options to mutual funds and bonds, and hope that certain beliefs about long term historical returns hold true until you need your money at the end of your working life.
That is exactly the first conversation that I had with my financial planner 7 years ago. She said to me, “Ouida, these mutual funds, 401Ks and 529 college plans…this is all a great experiment Large groups of people have never retired or planned for college in this way before and we won’t know how this experiment is going to turn out for another 10 years or so.”
When I heard that, I thought how silly the television pundits and financial authors are who teach and preach that investors should invest for the long haul and dollar cost average. They simply articulated unproven strategies in an overall experiment that began in the late 1970’s when corporations began to shift the responsibility for retirement planning and pension funding onto employees. I thought about the meaningless conversations that I had with my erstwhile plumber about the latest hot mutual fund and whether or not he should buy Google. The Great 401K Experiment has turned the majority of employees into investors and turned the man on the street or the salesman behind the desk into a financial guru.
Wikipedia defines an experiment in the following manner:
In scientific inquiry, an experiment (Latin: ex- periri, "to try out") is a method of investigating causal relationships among variables. An experiment is a cornerstone of the empirical approach to acquiring data about the world and is used in both natural sciences and social sciences. An experiment can be used to help solve practical problems and to support or negate theoretical assumptions.
I wonder who ever thought that by diligently placing money in their 401K that they were “trying out” their retirement plan?
In scientific inquiry we use an experiment to determine an outcome. As a physician, I rely on the outcomes of well-designed experiments to determine the best therapeutic strategy for my patients. In health care, by the time an experiment involving a therapeutic intervention is carried out on human test subjects, basic assumptions about the therapeutic intervention have already been formulated and tested in the laboratory. In medicine, we know what the variables are and we control for them, we have specific outcome measures and, most importantly, we can stop the experiment if the outcome is out of line with expectations and proves to be harmful to patients.
Despite involving human test subjects, the goings on in the world of finance and retirement planning have nothing to do with a safe controlled experiment. No, in the world of personal finance and retirement planning, we have what is known as an observational study. In an observational study, people participate in a series of activities and we follow them long term to the, uh, end. Whatever that end is. We are simply along for the ride waiting to see what happens. In terms of retirement planning, that could mean a retirement lived in poverty or a retirement in which all of the financial needs are met. But this experiment does not guaranty the latter outcome.
Let’s look at the assumptions that financial planners and employees alike have made:
1) In retirement, expenses will go down. Therefore retirees will need only 75% of their pre-retirement income. This assumption basically means that a person with an annual income of $100,000 during their working years, should set enough aside to generate an annual income of $75, 000 in retirement. This assumption has one basic flaw: it ignores inflation. Current estimates are that retirees will need $250,000 to $300,000 dollars to handle health care expenditures alone. This basic tenet of retirement planning ignores the realities of many retirees, personal illness, the need to care for a sick spouse or adult children.
2) Stock market returns average 8% per year over the long haul. This is simply untrue. A quick trip to moneychimp.com shows that the S&P has returned 8.76% since 1871. However that percentage drops to 6.56% when adjusted for inflation. If you could have been invested in the markets for the past 137 years you could have done okay. But 137 years really does challenge the idea of just what the long haul is. The long haul is certainly more than 10 years. From January 1, 1998 to December 31, 2008 market returns were 0.96%. Inflation-adjusted returns were -1.44%. As I discuss in my article, The Stock Market: The Second Greatest Financial Scam of the 20th Century, the long haul for stocks is more like 30 years. It becomes obvious, then, what you should do if you are 50, intend to retire at 65 and are contemplating putting money in the markets as an investment.
3) Home prices will always go up. This assumption made home ownership tantamount to putting money away monthly into a super-charged savings account. I’ve never seen a savings account lose value the way the housing market did during the Savings and Loan crash and this most recent financial downturn.
4) Capital gains are better than cashflow. The current economic environment is a prime example of what happens when people invest for capital gains alone. When the capital gains party stops wealth is devastated. With cashflow, however, businesses can operate as usual. It is estimated that 20 percent of real estate loans made during the housing boom went to investors. What if all of those investors had invested for cashflow? Price appreciation made cashflow impossible for most of the investor purchases that were made in the last 4 years of the most recent real-estate boom. Absent cash flow, investor money would have remained on the sidelines, fewer loans would have been made, property valuations would have remained in check and part of the speculation that drove the recent housing market would have been absent.
What happens when the basic assumptions of an experiment prove false? The experiment fails. In medicine, a failed experiment sends everyone back to the drawing board looking for answers. Not so in the world of personal finance. Personal Finance is called personal finance for a reason. You are the person and it is your finance. You are the only one who goes back to the drawing board usually with less money than you started with. The broker who sold you the stocks made his money. The fee-only planner that you were told to use by Smart Money Magazine made her money. The fund manager made his money.
What is the solution? Education. Education of the financial type. Every waking minute of every waking day. Yes this is work, but it is the only way. Those who don’t want to do this type of work should remain participants in the observational experiment to whatever end. My financial planner made sure that I stayed out of 529 plans, and that I did not invest in IRAs outside of my 401K plan. The way to wealth is simple and it is the following:
1) Live below your means
2) If housing prices in your area are too high, rent, but aim to keep total housing costs at less than 20% of income
3) Buy a quality car no more often than every 10 years and maintain that car. Car leases and frequent new car purchases are among the greatest drainers of household wealth
4) Eliminate consumer debt.
5) Obtain skills in writing, sales and marketing
6) Save
7) Invest savings into income-producing assets:
a) businesses such as network marketing
b) real-estate
8) Work with those assets once you do invest to make sure they produce income.
9) Protect all assets via entities
10) Find advisors and partners that you can trust who have your interests in mind. They are not hard to find
11) Understand yourself and your tolerance for risk. For many putting money into bonds and not giving financial education another thought is the best strategy.
12) Read a financial book per month and attend one business development seminar per year that teaches a specific skill
13) Stay away from mainstream financial magazines. They only offer the same pabulum that has left many high and dry, stripped of their wealth.
14) Subscribe to Investors Business Daily, The Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal
15) Stay away from personal development seminars but read personal development books
16) Implement the strategies and skills from the seminars and books
Your time investment will be at least 10 hours per week.
Are you ready to invest the time and get going?
What if the first thing that your financial planner told you after the usual obligatory greeting was that you were about to embark on a great experiment? That experiment would require you to set a consistent amount of money aside for 30 years in a lock box controlled by investment banks and the United States Federal Government, limit your investment options to mutual funds and bonds, and hope that certain beliefs about long term historical returns hold true until you need your money at the end of your working life.
That is exactly the first conversation that I had with my financial planner 7 years ago. She said to me, “Ouida, these mutual funds, 401Ks and 529 college plans…this is all a great experiment Large groups of people have never retired or planned for college in this way before and we won’t know how this experiment is going to turn out for another 10 years or so.”
When I heard that, I thought how silly the television pundits and financial authors are who teach and preach that investors should invest for the long haul and dollar cost average. They simply articulated unproven strategies in an overall experiment that began in the late 1970’s when corporations began to shift the responsibility for retirement planning and pension funding onto employees. I thought about the meaningless conversations that I had with my erstwhile plumber about the latest hot mutual fund and whether or not he should buy Google. The Great 401K Experiment has turned the majority of employees into investors and turned the man on the street or the salesman behind the desk into a financial guru.
Wikipedia defines an experiment in the following manner:
In scientific inquiry, an experiment (Latin: ex- periri, "to try out") is a method of investigating causal relationships among variables. An experiment is a cornerstone of the empirical approach to acquiring data about the world and is used in both natural sciences and social sciences. An experiment can be used to help solve practical problems and to support or negate theoretical assumptions.
I wonder who ever thought that by diligently placing money in their 401K that they were “trying out” their retirement plan?
In scientific inquiry we use an experiment to determine an outcome. As a physician, I rely on the outcomes of well-designed experiments to determine the best therapeutic strategy for my patients. In health care, by the time an experiment involving a therapeutic intervention is carried out on human test subjects, basic assumptions about the therapeutic intervention have already been formulated and tested in the laboratory. In medicine, we know what the variables are and we control for them, we have specific outcome measures and, most importantly, we can stop the experiment if the outcome is out of line with expectations and proves to be harmful to patients.
Despite involving human test subjects, the goings on in the world of finance and retirement planning have nothing to do with a safe controlled experiment. No, in the world of personal finance and retirement planning, we have what is known as an observational study. In an observational study, people participate in a series of activities and we follow them long term to the, uh, end. Whatever that end is. We are simply along for the ride waiting to see what happens. In terms of retirement planning, that could mean a retirement lived in poverty or a retirement in which all of the financial needs are met. But this experiment does not guaranty the latter outcome.
Let’s look at the assumptions that financial planners and employees alike have made:
1) In retirement, expenses will go down. Therefore retirees will need only 75% of their pre-retirement income. This assumption basically means that a person with an annual income of $100,000 during their working years, should set enough aside to generate an annual income of $75, 000 in retirement. This assumption has one basic flaw: it ignores inflation. Current estimates are that retirees will need $250,000 to $300,000 dollars to handle health care expenditures alone. This basic tenet of retirement planning ignores the realities of many retirees, personal illness, the need to care for a sick spouse or adult children.
2) Stock market returns average 8% per year over the long haul. This is simply untrue. A quick trip to moneychimp.com shows that the S&P has returned 8.76% since 1871. However that percentage drops to 6.56% when adjusted for inflation. If you could have been invested in the markets for the past 137 years you could have done okay. But 137 years really does challenge the idea of just what the long haul is. The long haul is certainly more than 10 years. From January 1, 1998 to December 31, 2008 market returns were 0.96%. Inflation-adjusted returns were -1.44%. As I discuss in my article, The Stock Market: The Second Greatest Financial Scam of the 20th Century, the long haul for stocks is more like 30 years. It becomes obvious, then, what you should do if you are 50, intend to retire at 65 and are contemplating putting money in the markets as an investment.
3) Home prices will always go up. This assumption made home ownership tantamount to putting money away monthly into a super-charged savings account. I’ve never seen a savings account lose value the way the housing market did during the Savings and Loan crash and this most recent financial downturn.
4) Capital gains are better than cashflow. The current economic environment is a prime example of what happens when people invest for capital gains alone. When the capital gains party stops wealth is devastated. With cashflow, however, businesses can operate as usual. It is estimated that 20 percent of real estate loans made during the housing boom went to investors. What if all of those investors had invested for cashflow? Price appreciation made cashflow impossible for most of the investor purchases that were made in the last 4 years of the most recent real-estate boom. Absent cash flow, investor money would have remained on the sidelines, fewer loans would have been made, property valuations would have remained in check and part of the speculation that drove the recent housing market would have been absent.
What happens when the basic assumptions of an experiment prove false? The experiment fails. In medicine, a failed experiment sends everyone back to the drawing board looking for answers. Not so in the world of personal finance. Personal Finance is called personal finance for a reason. You are the person and it is your finance. You are the only one who goes back to the drawing board usually with less money than you started with. The broker who sold you the stocks made his money. The fee-only planner that you were told to use by Smart Money Magazine made her money. The fund manager made his money.
What is the solution? Education. Education of the financial type. Every waking minute of every waking day. Yes this is work, but it is the only way. Those who don’t want to do this type of work should remain participants in the observational experiment to whatever end. My financial planner made sure that I stayed out of 529 plans, and that I did not invest in IRAs outside of my 401K plan. The way to wealth is simple and it is the following:
1) Live below your means
2) If housing prices in your area are too high, rent, but aim to keep total housing costs at less than 20% of income
3) Buy a quality car no more often than every 10 years and maintain that car. Car leases and frequent new car purchases are among the greatest drainers of household wealth
4) Eliminate consumer debt.
5) Obtain skills in writing, sales and marketing
6) Save
7) Invest savings into income-producing assets:
a) businesses such as network marketing
b) real-estate
8) Work with those assets once you do invest to make sure they produce income.
9) Protect all assets via entities
10) Find advisors and partners that you can trust who have your interests in mind. They are not hard to find
11) Understand yourself and your tolerance for risk. For many putting money into bonds and not giving financial education another thought is the best strategy.
12) Read a financial book per month and attend one business development seminar per year that teaches a specific skill
13) Stay away from mainstream financial magazines. They only offer the same pabulum that has left many high and dry, stripped of their wealth.
14) Subscribe to Investors Business Daily, The Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal
15) Stay away from personal development seminars but read personal development books
16) Implement the strategies and skills from the seminars and books
Your time investment will be at least 10 hours per week.
Are you ready to invest the time and get going?
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Zack, Miri, the P-Word and the Laws of Success
The “p-word” is Porno and Zack and Miri, life long friends decided to make one. Busted and broke, Zack thinks it would be an easy to make a porno and make money. Miri thinks that if it were easy, everyone would do it. Zack raises the money, finds a studio, writes the script and together they select the cast. They are on a roll and ending their financial problems does seem easy, but before they shoot a scene, they lose their studio, props and investment. Miri was right…not so easy. This movie was not a tale of persistence or success, they never do make their porno and the best we can figure out is that they never do change their financial situation. Friends, Zack and Miri, do fall in love, but nothing else changes.
Their experience is true for so many who seek positive financial change in their lives, assume the change will be easy and rush, headlong, into disappointment.
Not everyone that I talk to about getting started in a home-based business gets started. In fact most don’t. I have learned over the years, that when a prospective business partner says no to me, what they are really saying is that there must be an easier way to make money. There must be an easier way to make money than sales, there must be an easier way to make money than marketing, there must be an easier way to make money than saving and investing, there must be an easier way to make money than taking classes at night to improve skills. There must be an easier way. Period.
As Zack and Miri found and most wealth seekers find: There isn’t. Faced with the harsh reality that there isn’t an easier way, wealth seekers either quit seeking wealth or they vow to acquire the necessary skill sets to gain and retain wealth. Few people choose the latter. The majority, never quite letting go of the misplaced belief that there must be an easier way, drift aimlessly from project to project, opportunity to opportunity becoming increasingly disillusioned with each failure.
Unfortunately few people ever make and complete the journey of wealth creation. According to the Tax Foundation’s July report of individual income tax data, ten percent of American households make over $100,000 per year. In their book, The Millionaire Next Door, Stanley and Danko indicate that the average household income of millionaires is $247,000.
When Stanley and Danko wrote their book, they focused on millionaires because they thought that many American households could attain that level of wealth within a single lifetime. “About 95 percent of millionaires in America have a net worth of between $1million and $10 million. Much of the discussion in this book centers on this segment of the population. Why focus on this group? Because this level of wealth can be attained in one generation. It can be attained by many Americans.”
Why do some succeed while others ultimately fail?
People who seek and ultimately gain wealth gain different skill sets from those who don’t. Napoleon Hill places Specialized Knowledge among the 15 required assets to create wealth in his book, Think and Grow Rich. How long does it take to acquire Specialized Knowledge or a new, useable, skill set? 1000 hours, according to Michael Masterson in his book, Automatic Wealth. That is roughly 2 years at 10 hours a week for the person who has a full-time job and is seeking to change his or her financial picture. So one must either gain Specialized Knowledge or align himself with one who has it. Every other success strategy or characteristic outlined in Napoleon Hill’s Books requires work to attain or practice. Desire, Self-Control, Autosuggestion, Faith and a Definite Aim, require daily practice. Forming a Mastermind group does not require daily practice, but it does require a commitment to that group, and it often does require rearrangements within social networks. That is changing the people you hang out with.
The Success Strategies are also known as Laws of Success. They are so called because they cannot be negotiated with, they simply are.
The irony is that without any knowledge of the Laws of Success, Zack and Miri employed them. They had a Definite Aim: to change their financial picture. Their living situation reinforced that aim daily. Their group of actors and camera-men became their Mastermind Group and their group became self-reinforcing facilitating Faith, Autosuggestion and Specialized Knowledge. Zack initially had Persistence and Imagination to overcome the setback of losing their equipment, set and props. But lost Self-Control and Persistence when he realized he loved Miri. Without knowing the Laws of Success, he used the Laws of Success. Without knowing the Laws of Success, he broke them. Breaking the Laws of Success will undo the plans of success as Zack discovered, because he never did achieve his Definite Aim: to change his financial picture.
The truth is that whether we acknowledge them or not, we live in a world governed by Laws, Rules and Regulations. Many of which we use without acknowledgement and many of which we break in ignorance. We take for granted that we can leave our home without floating away because gravity allows us to walk down the street. We understand that what goes up, must come down and that our best hope is to control the nature of the landing.
Such are the Laws of Success. They exist and they work no matter our state of awareness.
Their experience is true for so many who seek positive financial change in their lives, assume the change will be easy and rush, headlong, into disappointment.
Not everyone that I talk to about getting started in a home-based business gets started. In fact most don’t. I have learned over the years, that when a prospective business partner says no to me, what they are really saying is that there must be an easier way to make money. There must be an easier way to make money than sales, there must be an easier way to make money than marketing, there must be an easier way to make money than saving and investing, there must be an easier way to make money than taking classes at night to improve skills. There must be an easier way. Period.
As Zack and Miri found and most wealth seekers find: There isn’t. Faced with the harsh reality that there isn’t an easier way, wealth seekers either quit seeking wealth or they vow to acquire the necessary skill sets to gain and retain wealth. Few people choose the latter. The majority, never quite letting go of the misplaced belief that there must be an easier way, drift aimlessly from project to project, opportunity to opportunity becoming increasingly disillusioned with each failure.
Unfortunately few people ever make and complete the journey of wealth creation. According to the Tax Foundation’s July report of individual income tax data, ten percent of American households make over $100,000 per year. In their book, The Millionaire Next Door, Stanley and Danko indicate that the average household income of millionaires is $247,000.
When Stanley and Danko wrote their book, they focused on millionaires because they thought that many American households could attain that level of wealth within a single lifetime. “About 95 percent of millionaires in America have a net worth of between $1million and $10 million. Much of the discussion in this book centers on this segment of the population. Why focus on this group? Because this level of wealth can be attained in one generation. It can be attained by many Americans.”
Why do some succeed while others ultimately fail?
People who seek and ultimately gain wealth gain different skill sets from those who don’t. Napoleon Hill places Specialized Knowledge among the 15 required assets to create wealth in his book, Think and Grow Rich. How long does it take to acquire Specialized Knowledge or a new, useable, skill set? 1000 hours, according to Michael Masterson in his book, Automatic Wealth. That is roughly 2 years at 10 hours a week for the person who has a full-time job and is seeking to change his or her financial picture. So one must either gain Specialized Knowledge or align himself with one who has it. Every other success strategy or characteristic outlined in Napoleon Hill’s Books requires work to attain or practice. Desire, Self-Control, Autosuggestion, Faith and a Definite Aim, require daily practice. Forming a Mastermind group does not require daily practice, but it does require a commitment to that group, and it often does require rearrangements within social networks. That is changing the people you hang out with.
The Success Strategies are also known as Laws of Success. They are so called because they cannot be negotiated with, they simply are.
The irony is that without any knowledge of the Laws of Success, Zack and Miri employed them. They had a Definite Aim: to change their financial picture. Their living situation reinforced that aim daily. Their group of actors and camera-men became their Mastermind Group and their group became self-reinforcing facilitating Faith, Autosuggestion and Specialized Knowledge. Zack initially had Persistence and Imagination to overcome the setback of losing their equipment, set and props. But lost Self-Control and Persistence when he realized he loved Miri. Without knowing the Laws of Success, he used the Laws of Success. Without knowing the Laws of Success, he broke them. Breaking the Laws of Success will undo the plans of success as Zack discovered, because he never did achieve his Definite Aim: to change his financial picture.
The truth is that whether we acknowledge them or not, we live in a world governed by Laws, Rules and Regulations. Many of which we use without acknowledgement and many of which we break in ignorance. We take for granted that we can leave our home without floating away because gravity allows us to walk down the street. We understand that what goes up, must come down and that our best hope is to control the nature of the landing.
Such are the Laws of Success. They exist and they work no matter our state of awareness.
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