Knowledge Center
This Section of our website is dedicated to helping you change your
Do You Have a Financial Road Map?
views and attitude about money.
The Rich Do Get Richer, but now You Can Too!
Do You Have a Financial Road Map?
Here we will be updating our content regularly to share the strategies and tools that have helped many people reach the pinnacle of their financial success.
Our parents taught us that if you’re not part of the solution, then by default you must be part of the problem. The challenge is that most people lack any significant amount of ambition. Today many people stand by waiting for someone else to fix the problems of society, the economy, protection, policing, and national and local political problems.
Take Action
Your first step is to get a financial physical from a well qualified financial professional. Take the time to take a snapshot of your financial affairs, relative to where you want to be in the future. See if you can identify areas where you are simply transferring your wealth. Find the money, do something productive with it, and eliminate every unnecessary transfer of wealth and expense that you don’t have to pay. Stop paying attention to the pennies, by cutting coupons, while dollar bills are flying out the window.
You have a choice, you can continue to live in fear, or you can dare to attempt to live the life that you always dreamed it could be . . . and maybe to become the person that you’ve always wanted to be. This exercise should also help you define your picture of success in advance.
Know Where You Stand Financially
Take a financial checkup exam. Where you are today, relative to where you want to be in the future? Most people have no idea whether they’re going to succeed financially or fall short of their long-term goals. Most of the planning that’s done is either needs based or finite in nature. They’re linear plans that use spreadsheets, which are not three dimensional and do not take into account all of the other moving parts in your life. They simply illustrate a concept in a vacuum and assume that everything will play out exactly as shown—with a small disclaimer at the bottom that says sometimes things don’t go this way.
Focus on your wants and the maximum value that you can achieve and then work backward. How much do you need to put in to have a good chance of having all that you want to have? As opposed to “What’s the minimum that I have to put in?”
Mindset and Vision
It’s always important to keep an open mind. When we stop growing, we stop learning and e start moving in the wrong direction. We turn off or tune out the ability to receive information and ideas because we believe we already know everything there is to know about a particular topic. When this happens, many great ideas and opportunities are lost.
How To Get Started
The most important words that come to our minds are desire and commitment. Without it, it will be very difficult to accomplish a task. You must have a commitment to get out of financial prison and debt, and it must be fueled by a burning desire and passion to be financially healthy. This may require a change in your priorities in life and recognizing that controlling your finances as they relate to the banking system is one of the most important things that can be done in your financial world.
We recommend that you find a financial professional that is thoroughly familiar with this type of planning. In this case, such a professional would be thoroughly familiar with the questions that would help you find out just how you’re spending your money and also show you ways to redirect that cash flow to your own accounts.
Above all, it requires patience and dedication. You must stick to the task at hand. It’s going to take years to get started and it needs to be a long-term, if not a lifetime commitment. This is much like developing a physical conditioning program. First step is to evaluate your current condition, work with a coach or a trainer and design a program of both exercise and diet that you stick to regularly. As you make progress, your coach will make changes and adjustments to your overall plan in an effort to improve your ultimate result. This planning strategy works. Millions of people can attest to the fact that this program works both financially and physically.
Questions you should ask yourself are:
How committed are you to achieving your goals?
Do you have a definite plan for accumulating riches?
What are you afraid of?
Focus can help you overcome your fears. Once you consider the cost of achieving your goals, you must be determined to pay the price. It will be easier once it is time to actually pay the price. If you have already decided that the price of success is worth paying, you can move forward without hesitation. Most people are interested in success, but they are committed to living in a safety zone. They are not willing to pay the price.
Your goal should be to build a sound financial plan using various interconnected, coordinated, and integrated components. The obstacles of your success include taxation, other expenses, bills, wealth transfers, the possibility of running out of time, procrastination, and your lack of discipline. It is time to stop pointing fingers and start taking responsibility for our actions, both individually and collectively.
A Call to Action
Are you ready to take responsibility for your actions? Are you ready to change your future and create a new future to fulfill your destiny? It’s time to stop complaining and stop blaming others for what you’ve done or chosen not to do. There is no bailout plan for you—no life preserver and no do-over! You only get one shot at life. You need to step up and take action. If you don’t, you will automatically choose a plan based on pure luck, and may likely end up on the road to financial ruin. Let’s let the others help you build wealth.
Step 1: No Excuses!
Build the right habits and create a new mindset. Eliminate waste, recapture your money, and put it to work for you! This requires a conscious commitment on your part to take responsibility for your life… no excuses! It’s going to take you at least 30 days of modeling this behavior before you begin to think this way.
Step 2: Create Your Environment
The next step is to not tolerate excuses from others around you. In your personal, family, or your professional life, you should work hard not to accept excuses, point fingers, or blame anyone in your life. If they’re in your life, try to help them fix it or get them out of your life quickly. Surround yourself only with positive people.
The enemies of your ability to build wealth may be deeply grounded in your personal concept of money and the belief systems that you have come to hold dear to you that may have been taught to you in your current environment; including your family. There’s no reason to worry about the future. Worry is a futile, emotional state and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when all you think about is negativity; it’s bound to follow you and seep into your life in every way imaginable. If you don’t action . . . the things that you were afraid of will most likely become your reality.
Work with people who have the desire to improve their lives, a commitment to make it better, and who have the sense of urgency to take action. We only work with people who are serious about their money, who are friendly, and who are in a position to make definitive decisions. Even if the decision is no, you’re not going to move forward. That’s fine. We want to teach you how to control your environment. We want people who are willing to do whatever it takes to succeed as long as it’s legal, moral, and ethical.
Partner with people who understand that life and the pursuit of money is a journey, not a destination. They must understand that setbacks are natural and a normal part of the wealth building process. Seek to minimize that risk through proper risk management and coordination, while creating efficiency within your plans. We want people who embrace change, who are persistent and steadfast in their beliefs, and who believe that the plan will work over time. In short, we want to work with people who say “I want to get better than I am.” People who are constantly striving to improve themselves, their standard of living, and their quality of life. Surround yourself with people who say, “He did it. Why can’t that be me?” and not “if I can do it . . .” but “how can I do it?” Our strategies are designed to show you exactly that. You can succeed where others fail.
We explained earlier, during our discussion on the history of money that most people do not understand the laws of money, science of money, or how it actually behaves. Many people believe they can create their own plan by simply using some mathematical calculators that they find online or are shown to them by their insurance or financial professionals.
Time to Step on The Scale
Judging your health by how your jeans fit, as opposed to a regular weigh in and an annual physical performed by a medical professional is not a substitute for a proper assessment of your health. The same is true of your finances.
It is time to take a look at your complete financial picture. Time to take your head out of the sand and assess the moving parts separately and collectively. Not going to the doctor (therefore preventing your doctor from being able to tell that you are sick) is not the same thing as being healthy!
Rules to Live By
Be debt free. Save definite amounts, and build an integrated plan sequentially. Make sure that as you begin to save and grow wealth on your financial model, the anchor of financial debt cannot weigh down your disciplined savings strategies. It doesn’t do you any good to fill your left pocket if someone comes along and siphons the money out of your right pocket. If not, we’re back to driving down the highway with one foot on the gas and one on the brakes. You shouldn’t have any nondeductible debt in your model at all, so work hard to eliminate your debt, even if it means that you have to work multiple jobs. Do your best to become debt-free. Good luck and we hope to see you on the road to wealth.
Highlights
- Commit to making financial changes in your life now. Are you willing to pay the price for success?
- Implement a regular savings and investment program. Start small and build up your savings amounts (Target of 15-20% pre-tax savings levels).
- Know where you stand financially. Implement your emergency fund, coordinate your insurance programs, and know if you will be able to retire.
- Identify opportunities where you may be transferring wealth and then take steps to eliminate them and recover those dollars for your own use.
Pay It Forward? Hopefully you found the contents on this site useful. Our mission is to promote financial awareness and spread fiscal literacy throughout the world. Our goal is to enhance the lives of over 1M people this year. If you know if anyone else that could benefit from finding some money and eliminating unnecessary wealth transfers, please forward this page to a friend. Remember, if you’re not part of the solution, you might be part of the problem. Thank you in advance for your support and your help in spreading our message.
