Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

10 simple ways to save money in tough times, #9 Be more energy effecient

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#9 SAVE ENERGY

There are many ways to save energy and therefore money.  Some do a lot while others are more of a myth.

Time of Use plans

One of the best ways to save a lot of money is to select an energy plan for your house that fits your usage model.  When a utility makes electricity they do it in a few different ways.  Most power comes from what we call BASE power plants.  These are plants that are always on, day, night, 24/7.  Most of these are Coal and Nuclear.  This electricity is cheap and efficient.  Wind and solar energy are not really created under the control of the utility.  A utility tries to have enough base power to provide all the power that their customers need at least 80% of the time.  For the rest they turn to DEMAND power.  This is power that they can either buy or turn on as needed.  Hydroelectric is a great example.  These plants are mostly turned off during the night, but during the top of the demand time they could be at full force.  In addition power generated in cold climates can be sold to warmer clients during the summer and visa versa.

Because of the much higher cost of this DEMAND power electric companys want you to not use it, so they offer programs to encourage you to shift your usage to non peak times, and they also have programs to encourage you to use a more steady amount of power during these peak time.  So it is simple, here is in Arizona I have APS, and I use a program called Combined Advantage.  With this program I pay only 4 cents per kWh from 7pm until noon each day.  But from noon until 7pm on weekdays I pay 6 cents during the winter and 9 cents during the summer.  On top of that I have a demand fee of $13.40 per kW used during the highest 1 hour of usage during peak time.  What this means for me is that I can use almost as much power as I want from 7pm until Noon and pay almost nothing.  I just have to keep my usage down during the peak time.  I have been able to never go above 6kW during my peak hour.  By using this model I used 20% more power than last year but enjoyed bills over 30% LESS.  Last year I was on the 9pm until 9am program, but it had no Demand Charge.  I already had them look into how much it would cost if I was on the normal rate program and it would be over DOUBLE what I am paying now.   So change your plan and cut your power bill in half.

Space Heaters

Here in Arizona it does not get that cold.  We have found that it is not a good idea to heat the entire house.  When you heat with your large central heating system as much as half the heat you create escapes out of the unit itself or through the duct system.  Even if you have a very efficient Gas heater like I do it is still much cheaper to just heat the rooms you need, especially if you are on a time of use electrical plan and only use it during the off peak time.  When we stopped using the central heating system our gas bill went down by over $70 per month while our electric bill for the space heaters was only $10 more than the previous year.

Fans

Fans are another way to save money, a good ceiling fan will make you feel 5 degrees cooler than it actually is.  With a fan an 80 degree room will feel like 75 degrees and that fan costs just pennies a month to run.  Invest in ceiling fans and save money.  Another way to save is to have door and window fans to draw in the outside air during the times of day that it is cooler.

LCD Monitors

I am a computer guy so of course I need to talk about technology a bit.  An LCD monitor is much more efficient than the older CRT monitors, in fact the average 19″ CRT uses over 300W of power, while a LCD uses less than 25W, a HUGE difference.  If used 40 hours a week, at the normal power rates this adds up to about $9 per month per monitor.   With the cost of an LCD being about $120 that means that you would save about enough money in the first year to pay for the new monitor!  So why are you still reading this on an OLD CRT.

While we are talking about saving money with computers, modern computer use MUCH less power than older ones.  The NEW cpus use laptop technology to scale back power usage and use less power and less cooling.  A new computer could be faster while saving as much as $3-5 per month in electricity.  If you are like me and leave it on 24/7 that comes to more like $15-$20 per month.

Vehicle

Your car also uses power, in the form of Gas.  You can do all the normal things like Tune up your car, and keep your tires inflated and you will receive a good 20%+ boost in the amount of mile you can drive.  Of course you can also reduce unnecessary weight in your car, select routes that have fewer left turns but it turns out that one of the best things you can do is to NOT drive a steady speed.  Don’t accelerate too fast, I try to keep my RPMs under 4000 at all times.  It will use much less fuel if you accelerate for a time, then coast for a time, going back and forth, you could increase your MPG by 20% or more by doing this.

There are many more simple ways to save energy, many power companies will help you pay for an Energy Audit.  This is where an expert will come in, usually with a infrared camera, and look for cold or hot spots on your house where you leak energy.  Most energy is spent to heat of cool things so this is a real eyeopener.

I am so excited about this…

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For over 5 years I have always wanted to be more involved in investing in real estate.  I have helped out many people with their investing, but the amount of investing that I have done for myself was not enough.  Sure I bought a few properties but nothing that was a turnkey money making solution….well that is UNTIL NOW.

Over the last few months I have spent countless hours educating myself, working on my connections, and working on a new website for Capital Active.  Well it is done now.  I have a functional site up and running.  But the REAL work was done finding and securing assignments on over 30 awesome wholesale deals.  You heard me right, you can now click HERE and find over 30, way below fair market value properties that you can invest in or simply buy for your own use!!!  This has me really excited.  It was a lot of work but it is worth it.

On top of having all of these great deals, I also have lined up people to help home buyers buy these homes, and if you are an investor we can help you find a tenant.

The readers of this blog will have the FIRST shot at buying these houses from me.  If you are interested in any of these please contact me ASAP, I hope these will go fast, they should because they are killer deals.

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The truth about Millionaires.

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Everyone wants to be a millionaire.  I always had it as a goal, a first step.  First I wanted to do it by the time I was 25, then I set it for 30.  Now I have a goal of doing it while I am 35.  But this time I have a firm plan to get there.

First off most people think that if you are one you will be set for life.  In many cases that is correct, but in most cases it took risk to get the million and most people who have it take those same risks and lose it.  There are ways to earn without too much risk, but mostly that is very slow.  Other people simply go crazy, they get the money too easily and spend it all.  Over 80% of lottery winners have a negative net worth just 5 years after they win.  They get this huge lifestyle, and then spend spend spend, and when the money runs out they borrow like crazy.

I personally know a lot of millionaires.  I don’t know of any who made the money trading time for money or having a job.  I know a few who won it, but the VAST majority worked hard, ran a business and invested the profits.  Some are in farming, some are in insurance, other have a business in one form or another but most are in real estate.  And all of the millionaires that I have asked about this invest heavily in real estate.  Time and time I hear that no matter how you make your millions that real estate is the best place to store the money.  Another common factor among those that have made and kept millions is that they live WAY below what you expect.  They drive older cars, they don’t shop at the fancy shops.  Most of them live on less than 60k per year.  That is still 5,000 per month.  While they were making their money they lived on much less.  Those people you see shopping at all the ritzy malls and spending thousands of dollars are usually people who earn a lot, and spend even more and have a negative net worth.

So what does it take to have a net worth over a million dollars.  I define it as all assets, at the price you could sell it for today minus all debt.  It is hard to value a business so I usually set that as valued as 8 times last years earnings as long as you project those earnings to go on.  Using that measure I actually was a millionaire once during the years that my business was really profitable, but I could not project that computers would become a commodity and that my business would start to lose money at huge rates until I was in the hole.

Also you can only grow your net worth from your personal profits each month.  If you have $3,000 in monthly expenses you need to deduct that from your income before you see if you have enough.  For me I have about $3,000 that I must spend each month to stay current.  About half of that is servicing debt, and could be gone if the interest rates were not so low.  If I am starting with a net worth of zero and I want to be a millionaire in 2 years I need to pack away about $42k per MONTH.  That is a crazy number, and that is why people with jobs don’t hit it.  Even if you had 8% interest on your side and you wanted to do it in 10 long years you would need to save over $7,000 per MONTH.  This is why less than 1% of the people are millionaires.  Even if you earned $120k per year and spent only $3k per month it would take you 10 years of constant effort.  The biggest problem is that when you earn that much, you usually hang out with other people who earn that much, and they start talking about their new cars, second homes and their vacations, and you feel “less than” for living on such a meager $3k per month and you can not maintain it.  It is like a bucket with a ton of holes in it, the more water you pour in the faster the holes take it out, and it never really gets full.  So the answer is clearly not a job, even a high paying one.  You have the limit of how much you can earn because of who you work for and with.  So a business is really the only answer, but to have a good business you need to be as good or better than all of the other businesses out there, or you need to have an idea that really sets you apart.  If you have a really great idea that can duplicate all over the world you can even become an instant billionaire.  This is what they folks at YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have done.  The first ones cashed out when the company was only 7 months old.  The second two have yet to cash out, though twitter just sold 2% of the company for $200 million, making the company worth over $10 billion.  But it is hard to come up with such an idea, most usually stumble upon it early.

So now we all have an up hill battle to climb.  So if you want to be a millionaire in 2 years from today you need to come up with an idea that makes you $50k per month on a constant basis.  Or if you want to build and sell a business you need make one that earns $125k-$150k next year, and that number is AFTER your take from the company because the company will need your or someone like you after you sell it.  The way you design a million dollar company is much different than the way you design a company that just pays your bills.

When you are looking for a large net worth you need to keep in mind the laws of large numbers.  One of the easiest ways to get there is to sell a product over and over.  Even if you only make $10 each time you do it, that means that you need to sell 100,000 items.  So plan your business accordingly.  If you need to sell 100,000 items that means that about only one out of every 1,000 households needs to buy your product.  Depending on your product that may mean that only 1% of the population even needs to know about your product.  But to even get 1% penetration may be a hard thing to do.  But one good viral video could do it for you, or one good endorsement.  Thousands have made it rich this way.

You can also get there by helping others reach for their dreams.  Imagine if you could help people earn a living and you got a cut of what they did.  For me this was always by hiring sales people.  I basically would set their wages to where they would get 40% of the profits that they generated.  I would pay for their phone, a place for them to work, I would help them close deals and I would design the products that they sold, I would even pay for them to have a base salary in case sales were slow that week.  The more successful they would be the more successful I would be.  If I have 3 or even 4 of these people it would keep me busy.  Imagine if I had 30 or 40, and if they averaged making $2000 for themselves per month, that means that each one would make me $3000 per month.  That alone is a million in a year!  Becoming a millionaire is REALLY a team sport.  I don’t know anyone who has worked to get a million who did not have a team behind them.  Most people I know help out people all of the time because the more people they help the more they make in the long run.

If you want to make it rich selling something, or helping other people get rich you need a system to manage the entire thing.  A system is really the key.  The good part is with a little math you can start to think about the system now, you can design the system now that will take you to the millions you want to have.  A good system with the right principles will take you there.  Run a simulation on your system, if it does average will it get you to where you want to be, is your system too small?  Is your system too hopeful, does it require that something unknown will happen to catapult you into your success, if that is the case it probably will not happen.  You can’t predict such things.

I really hope this helps you put your dreams in perspective.  And I hope you start to think how duplicating a successful system will get you there.  You need to focus on people, you need to focus on results.  Your plan must have the muscle to get you to your goals.

When you get your millions remember the little guys, remember to give back.  Millionaires are some of the nicest, most humble and most generous people I know.  Most millionaires are not they greedy people the movies and media make them out to be.  They usually are very humble because they know that peopled helped them along the way, and that being nice to people and helping others is the key to their success.  They feel lucky that they made it.

As always, please subscribe, and if you liked this blog please comment, I read them all personally.

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Do you respect your money?

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The other day Adrian posted a great blog entry that really got me thinking.  His idea is that the number one most important lesson to be learned by people who want to be rich or be better off is not delayed gratification, not saving, and not any of those other things that all the books tell you.  Instead it is the concept of actually respecting your money.

moneyPlease read his blog, it is good, but I want to take it even farther.  I think that you respect for money is based mostly on what you learned from your parents.  When I say respect I mean that you value money, you value the stuff that you own that you bought with your money.  I have found that most rich people I know have a deep respect for money.  Some of the richest people I know watch where they spend.  They almost never throw anything away, they will have a sale first.  This is not being frugal, these people will invest in very expensive quality items that will give them long term enjoyment and even have a residual value.  They will buy things, but when they do they make sure that they get the best value.  They also think long term, and they look at the total cost of something, including the financing cost.

For years I have been in retail sales, owning my own computer company.  I have always had the hardest negotiation with those that were rich.  They would fight for every dollar to get the best deal, and I would give it to them.  But the people who could barely afford my services would never ask for a discount.  I have had friends who are always out of money, but they would ask me to go out to a restaurant with me and they would spend 2-3 times as much as I did.  I value my money, so I look for the best value when I spend it, at a restaurant that means usually having a coupon and usually I order one large item that will fill me up.  But most people order a smaller item, then the add on the salad, an appetizer and then if that is still not enough they add on dessert.  This same guy also had his car break down, it was going to be 400 to fix it, so he decided that it was time to get a newer car.  He found a car that was worth about $7000 and he bought it from a dealership that caters to people like him, he paid over $11,000 after he traded in his old one, and he agreed to 24% interest.  He did not need this car now, and I had connections he could had used to get it much cheaper BUT he needed it THAT DAY, he could not wait, and he paid the price for it.

Needing gratification now is the KEY that keeps most poor people poor.  Companies know this.  Car dealerships are told to get people to fall in love with the car then tell them that they need to buy it now to get that one.  One of the most profitable segments in our economy right now are the rent to own stores, just pay a bit now and you can take these new items home.  The typical price is about 350% the price you would pay if you just bought it at walmart today.

But the other most common trend among these people is that they never would think of starting their own business.  They usually don’t think about selling their old stuff, they simply give it away.  A friend of mine is in charge of cleaning up houses after they give their keys to the bank, and it is astounding how much stuff of great value they leave behind.  They leave furniture, toys, TV’s, computers, clothes lighting, and boxes and boxes of stuff.  Why did they not sell this stuff, and pay their mortgage…we will never know.

People that respect and value their money are able to live much much longer with out money.  A lot of people who own businesses now are also hurting, they have lost their business, they have lost their credit, yet almost all of them that I know are doing quite well, they manage to find money to pay the bills each month, they sell things, they dabble in freelancing for other companies, they do consulting, but the bottom line is that they do what they need to to keep afloat.  Then I know other people, who have never had that drive, and they sit at home all day playing video games, and they do nothing other than look for handouts.

This fundimental view of money does a lot more than effect our personal lives, it also shapes our nation.  Because the rich and poor spend money so differently they often scratch their head when they look at eachother.  When I had a lot of money, yet I would still buy things on sale, and I drove a modest SUV and such, many people wondered why I did not spend more, why I was also so “cheap”, it was not logical to them.  And then I look at them, and how much they spend when they have nothing and I can’t understand it, it is not logical to me.

To me and others the most frustrating part of people not respecting money is when it is your money that they are not respecting.  At this time our governments are spending money at record levels, our money, and they are doing it with very little respect.  They give money away, they waste money all over the place.  Right now they are spending our kids money, but soon they will start spending ours.  The plan to start taxing energy soon, and many other things.

So think about how much you respect you money.  I would love to hear what you think, please leave a comment.

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MLM Math. The numbers behind the eFusjon comp plan.

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When you are looking to join a MLM you may find that some are VERY VERY complex while others are very simple.  Well I love math, and I always lean towards the very simple ones.  Complex MLM’s tend to not do as well as others, and also you never really know if it is all correct.  Some MLM’s are so complex that you are never quite sure what you are going to be getting paid.  I love math and I like to take a company comp plan and test it by pushing it to the max.  With most comp plans it is easier to do that by flipping it over, seeing how much the company has committed to pay out for any one sale.  Next I look at the MLM from a break even point.

So on to the math.  The MLM is called eFusjon.  My first thought was that they could not spell, I even had to Google how to spell it just to write this blog.  First off this business model is unique to anything that I have seen, it is very interesting and it is PURE math.  And I love math.  The way it works is very simple, you get paid $5.27 for each active person that is in your downline.  It is a 3 wide system, you have a left, center and right person.  But this is where it gets interesting, you share your left and right spot with other people who are to the left and right of your sponsor, the first one who fills the spot gets it.  If they put someone in under you then you are paid $1.20 per month on those people.  To be able to earn money you need to have three active people who you personally sponsored, and if they go inactive for 60 days their spot is erased.  The payment goes for 15 levels deep.  So when the whole system is full that means that 15 people are making $5.27 on your order, and as long as you are not in the center that other people get paid $1.20 off of your orders.  From my count this can be a VERY huge number, well if the company had millions of people in it and no one dropped out meaning that you had 15 levels full of people above you there would be (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13+14+15) 120 people who get the $1.20 override.  People.

So this means that on a $120 order that the company must pay out as much as $199.05 in commissions.  This is probably why they stopped paying $10 (Personal) and $5 (Sides) like when the company first started, because at that rate they would actually loose money on each order even with only 30,000 people in the company.  Of course a full system is over 100,000 people and only then would they start to pay out such huge numbers, but it will still be only half that get generate that much commissions for their upline.  I figure they need about 500,000 or so members for the system to stop working, and thus for them to be forced to change the system, I predict they will choose to change it once there is about 200k or so people in the company.  That may be some time from now, as there is only 30k at this time.  Also if people drop out that will also make holes in the chart which will also save the company money.  Of course they also need to produce the product for the $120 amount, and pay all of their bills.  One other thing that may save them is the fact that someone must recruit 3 before they get paid, and many never will do that.

The product is an energy drink, and it is healthy, and if I would buy it in the stores I would probably be willing to pay up to $1.50 or even $2.00 for a can, but I am really cheap.  Others would pay $3 with ease for a quality product that does what this does.  So lets say that it is worth $2 a can.  Well their price, with shipping and other fees is $166, for 48 cans.  So in my book you are getting $96 in product and paying $70 to participate in the MLM.  Now with a payback of about $5 for each person on your team you need 14 people to break even.  But it is much easier, because your upline can only put three people under each person so they must put people under you, and you get the full $5 for people in your direct upline, and $1.20 for people from the sides.  So if you find an active team you can quickly be in positive range.  If you find a superstar who can bring in 100 people in a short time then you would be making $500 a month.

So after looking at all of this, and crunching the numbers it all comes down to the team you are joining, and how many people you think you can bring in yourself.  So I looked at that.  The team that was showing me this has been in the company for less than 45 days, and they already have over 850 people.  They 2.8% of the entire company, and they are a group of builders that should have no problem putting in a 100’s per month.  Next the my good friend Fred was going to be directly above me, and he put in over 80 people in his last MLM in only 3 months, and that MLM was much harder to put people into.  Next I looked at the people I know, and how it would be easy to put at least a dozen of them in, and then they will put people in also, building a large group.  I know I need 14 people to make it even in my mind.  And with all of this I figured that 14 would be easy to get, I can probably even do it this month.  I need 32 to make this business totally free, and I think I can do that in the second month.  So I made the leap and I joined.  Most MLMs are built on math but most people who join them never look at the math.  I have looked at over 20 MLMs in the last 2 years and I have only joined 3 of them, simply because the math did not work on the others.  On those other ones there was no component of your upline building your team so on those I did not make money.   If you want to join in on my team will also receive the benefit of all of this, CLICK HERE to sign up, we will help you build into profitability ASAP.

I try to keep my personal brand to be that of Emerald Computers, the company that feeds me and pays my bills.  Most of the time that is all that I mention to people.   When I was looking at the math for efusjon I also took Emerald Computers into consideration, and that I may be able to sell computers, services, or websites to many of these people because of the fact that this company is very heavy into online marketing.  This made it a very easy decision, just from the few people there I already made two new clients who I should see this week.

One more final thought, another interesting part of this companies comp plan is the fact that you can sign up again and again under yourself.  So you can go a few levels, then you see a superstar, so you join again, and now you are double dipping, getting paid twice on their team.  It costs you $150 each month for each position so if you can create locations that pay more than that per month it is to your benefit to do so.  Plus you get more product to use.

I hope this helps, and I welcome any and all comments.

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The Cart is up and running, will this be a new era for Emerald Computers?

Business, Computers, concepts, Entrepreneurship, Internet, Marketing, Money,

After over 100 hours of my time and many more time from others, I finally have the cart that I always wanted for Emerald Computers.  It works perfect, it allows people to custom design their own computer system, it is easy to modify, it is easy to update.  Of course this is not the end of development.  I will be updating and adding new products as the market changes, I will also add much more data about each product in the coming weeks.

This cart software is one of the most advanced cart programs that exists today for anywhere under $10,000.  It does all of the advanced tricks that the huge companies do, like cross selling, up selling, layered navigation, full CMS support so you can have many skins and change in an instant.  It has bread crumb navigation also, user accounts with total control of access, tier pricing, built in SEO urls, client feedback system, cloud tag programs, and a hundred other cool features.  I am really glad that I decided to get this software, it totally rocks my world.

Everything us up and live RIGHT NOW, and I am letting the readers of my blog be some of the first people to view it.  Soon I will be linking it in with my main website. If you want to check it out and tell me what you think then CLICK HERE.

On a business note, I am really thinking that this will revitalize my company, and allow me to reach my goals in much less time than I thought before.  Wish me luck.

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My New Project

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I have gone silent on my blog for the longest time since I started it.   I have had two main reasons for this.

Reason number 1 is because my wife has been ill recently.  We spent 8 days in the hospital and I have had to put my business on the side to do much more with the kids.  She is feeling better now, and that leads me to my second reason.

For about 3 years now I have had an idea to help people sell computers online.  There are a ton of people who strongly believe that the future of business is online, and for most types of business I agree with them.   People compare and shop for things online, but they will always need some things to be in person.  For computers it is definitely online.   Now here is the problem, people want to make money online, but they simply don’t have the tools or knowledge that they need.  There are many companies that I have found that take advantage of this.  They take a very basic, and hardly working cart, and they put it online, and they give some basic consulting information.  They sell this to people who don’t know much about the Internet or about computers and they sell this for many thousands of dollars.

There are also many people who want to drop ship products, and for about 4 years now my company has been listed in books and many drop ship websites as a source of high quality computer systems.  We have been contacted by over 2000 people who have asked us about this.  They call me, they email me but 98% of them have never purchased anything.  Part of that is my fault because when I get little return from something I pay little attention to it.   Recently I updated my website and as a part of the application to do something with me I asked them where they currently are and what their goals are.  I would say that 90% of them have not yet created a cart, nor do they have much of a plan.  I totally understand this, because to install a good cart out there takes a ton of knowledge and work.  I am a complete computer expert and I still had to call tech support, and it still took me many many hours to figure out.  If someone does not understand HTML, PHP, JAVA, FTP, Linux Permissions, and 20 other things I don’t see how they would ever get it up on their own.  So they rely on these companies that “sell” carts.  The problem is that most of them leave you with an empty cart, and then they give you a list of companies like me and you need to create relationships with them.  There are a few that fill your cart up with items, but all the ones I found sell either really useless stuff that no one buys, or really over priced items that simply can’t be sold.  All of this is a huge discouraging mountain for the once gleeful and hopeful would be entrepreneur.

There is one local company that we know of that sells websites that are totally cookie cutter, they offer nothing in the way of custimization other than one “About Us” page that lets the merchant put a few small sentences about themself and their contact info.  It sells products that have not changed for over 30 years, like candles, lotions.  The problem is that they charge over $12,000 just to have one of these sites, and they charge thousands more to accept credit cards, and thousands more for consulting.  They then charge monthly hosting fees in the 100’s of dollars and if you ever stop paying you lose everything.  We have a sister company that offers help and consulting to clients of this company, and we have talked to 100’s of people, and we have NEVER talked to one who actually made a profit, yet this company sells 20-50 of their sites per day, mostly focusing on low income or elderly clients who know nothing about computers.  At least 20% of the ones we talked to did not even have a computer, many others could not even put food on their table but were asked to borrow $12k or more from friends and family to start thier business.  (If you can’t tell this type of business practice makes me really mad.)

cart homeSo what is my project.  Well first off I am building a site that sells the best and most popular computer products.  My site will use the latest design techniques and latest eCommerce tools.  I am putting everything on our site with small markup for me and a 20% profit margin for the people who but these sites.  I plan to sell this site for UNDER $1000, and this site will be a REAL oppertunity, something where people can make REAL money.  If they pay us $1,000 to build the site they only need to sell $5,000 in computer hardware to start to make money, and in computers that can take just a few days.  And the prices that I have on my site are VERY good, so they can advertise the site and make money right away.  People will be able to  add any other items they want to sell, they will also have the ability to totally customize the site.  And for a small fee we will even host it and update it daily.

So I have been spending almost all of my limited time building this site.  So far I have a 100% functional site, it has RSS Feeds, over 500 inventory items, and the complete ability to clone the site.  I still need to finish a few things so it is NOT open to the public yet, but I think that in the next week it will be.  I am excited to call these people and tell them that I finally have the ability to help them reach their dreams.  I have a great cart, that is affordable, functional and has products in it that allow them to make money from day one.  This has really been my goal for about three years now.  Part of my mission in life to help other people out.

If you would like to be on the list of people who I will call when this goes online, then go HERE.    If I can keep out the distractions I will have it up soon.

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My very steep mountain I plan to climb. (My Mission in life)

Bootstrap, Business, Computers, concepts, Entrepreneurship, how to, Inspiration, Investment, Money, real estate, The World, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This entry is about my mission in life, and my mindset right now.

My goal, is to be very wealthy.  I don’t really have a personal need to be wealthy but I have felt for a long time now that it is my calling in life to be so.  The reason for this is that I can help many people out, so that I can leave a legacy for my children and their children and to help the Kingdom of God in all of this.  I want to be the one who builds schools, churches, community housing projects and so on.  I have had a desire for this for many years but have gotten distracted a few time.  Now I feel like I am behind schedule, I have this huge goal and to accomplish it I need to act now and act aggressively.  I need to have a very steep slope to my net worth mountain.

The good news is that in times like this, with economic turmoil and such it is actually easier for a smart person who sees the trends to gain massive wealth.  I can buy stocks in good companies for huge discounts.  I can buy houses for cents on the dollar.  These things will always rebound, they may take some time but they will.  I can take advantage of the huge wave of people who are eager to snatch onto the dream of finally being their own boss, I can consult with them and make tools for them to get there easier, because I have been there my whole life.  Of course I will charge for this service.

My goal is to have a net worth of $5 million dollars by the time I am 40 years old, and $10m by the time I am 45.  (I am 33 now)  I will consider any donations I have made to be part of my net worth.  To get there I would need to earn a huge amount of money.  I will invest most of that money until I get to my goal.  This is a very steep mountain to climb.  I have made money at this rate in the past buy I grew my company too fast and trusted people who screwed me and soon I was bleeding 10k+ per month.  I have learned that lesson but I do know that I can not do all of this myself.  I need to use other peoples money and other peoples time to get to where I need to be.  If I do everything that needs to be done I will never make it, never even get close, I have to hire others to join me.  For over 10 years now I have always had at least a few people who work for me, people who I can call when I make a sale.

So to make this goal I need to really start to climb, to earn huge amounts of money.  Well that is actually much easier than you may think it is.  There is more opportunity now simply because the market is totally inefficient right now.  This means that prices are all over the place for the same item, mostly caused by crazy desperate people who are selling things at fire sale prices.  This lets us take advantage of research and work to find the best price on something and sell it to someone who does not do the research.  This can be done on houses, cars, computers, information, labor, and almost anything else that can be bought and sold.   You can buy cars for $5k that sell for $10k the next week.  You can buy houses for 20k that were once worth 200k and sell them for 80k with ease.   I just bought over $1500 in computer parts from a guy for $100 simply because he got them from a guy who went out of business and had no idea what they were worth.  Money is just sitting there everywhere waiting for someone to pick it up.

Right now is the best time I have ever seen in my life to buy Real Estate, and probably the best time there will be.  You can buy a house now for such a low price that you can rent it out and have the rental payments cover the entire cost in under 5 years.  You can then hold on to these houses for 10 years and sell it for many times the purchase price.  This is the main way I plan to make my long term money, but I need to fund this with short term money.  My plan for this is to sell websites, sell business opportunities, such as this one or this one.  I have another huge idea in the works that I think will make a million dollars in the next 3 years as long as it is done right.  I need all of this because I have a high goal.

Mindset is Key.  mindset

Less than half of a percent of the population in the US has a net worth over $1 million dollars, and with the current market that number is falling.  Most of the population is deep in debt and the ones that are not don’t have a huge net worth.  Most people simply do not posses the entrepreneurial spirit, they do not have the mindsets required.  They do not even have this as a goal.  There is probably less than 2% of the population that is serious about being an entrepreneur, about being truly wealthy and free.  For me and these others like me we must have a different mindset from the rest of the world.  What works for the normal, happy to have a job, people in this world actually hurts us.  And what works for us does not work for them.

There is about 10% of the population that thinks that they are an entrepreneur, people who have gone out and created for themselves a business, or they dabble on the side trying to run a small home based business but most of these do not have the correct mindset.  They simply do not see it.  For years many of my friends have fallen into this group, and for years I have talked to them, tried to show them the way.  Given them books on the subject like the awesome E-Myth by Michael Gerber.  All with very little result, they almost never get it, and they just can’t figure out why even when I tell them directly, so for the most part I have stopped.  I love to deal with the people who have the right mindset already.  You can tell someone simply does not get it when they keep saying “You can’t do that” but in reality there is very little we can not do.  We can buy houses for 10 cents on the dollar and not use one cent of our own money, we can sell a service to a client for one price and then hire someone else to perform that service for a much lower, yet still fair price.  We can do something once and get paid for that work for a long time to come.

entrepreneurTo have the correct mindset you must realize that there are different rules for us.  I have found that people like Donald Trump, Robert Kiyosaki, Ric Edelman, Dean Graziosi and Adrian Cartwood can equip you with the correct mindset.   For the other people who are not entrepreneurial they can listen to people like Suzy Orman, Clark Howard and David Ramsey but for us much of the information they say is toxic to our mindset.  They focus on what to do with the money that you earn, how to divide it, how to save it and such, and they focus very LITTLE on simply making more.   They focus on how you should not used debt at all.  I agree with all of this for “normal” people.  I think that normal people should only take on debt to go to college and buy a meager house, and maybe to buy a first car.   They should save their money for retirement and live a very frugal life.  They should max out their 401k and invest in mutual funds.  (For all people even these I strongly suggest that they separate their home equity from their home, it make much more sense.)

But for us E-Type people this is crazy talk.  I know I can do much better in life than that sort of existence.  If we have a good idea we should borrow to make it happen if we don’t have the resources ourselves.  We should keep an eye out for the needs of others and look for ways to fill those needs.  We should delegate anything that we can to free up our time to focus on growing our business.   We should focus on increasing our income 10 times as much as we focus on where it all goes.

E-Type people should give away money with abandon to worth causes.  I personally believe in Christian education and I help out many children go to private Christian schools, third world children who would not have a good education if I did not help out, now they have a chance to be something great in the future.  Almost every millionaire I know gives away more money per year that most people earn.  I remember a few years ago my Grandfather walked into his local church and gave them $100,000, just a few months before he died.  I remember growing up with my uncle and seeing him write checks for $5,000 when a missionary came to his local church.  I remember he would always give us $10 or so every time the offering came by and we would dump it in, teaching us to give.  I have a good friend locally who makes over $50k a month and gives over $10k of that away each month.    We are blessed to be a blessing, the more you send out the more you will get — people just don’t get it.

Final Thoughts

I really hope that you have gotten inspired by all of this.  I was inspired by the 7m7y project recently.  And just this week by two other great guys.  We really

Please don't send out stimulus checks…

Business, concepts, Entrepreneurship, Government, Investment, Money, Politics

The entire point of giving people money in the form of a stimulus is to get them to spend the money and actually stimulate the economy.  Many people have argued against the idea of giving people a stimulus check simply because most of the money will just be saved or used to pay down debt, things that don’t stimulate the economy.

I am not sure that having the government give away money is the best solution but it is what the current powers like.  So what is there was a way to basically force people to spend the money, I think that would work much better.  For all of the various stimulation that is planned it adds up to over $10,000 for every household in the US.  They mostly gave it to banks, and these banks did what was in their best interest, they saved it.  The government is trying to figure out a way to force the banks to lend out any new money they receive.  I predict that this will also fail.

The government knows it needs to spend money to stimulate the economy.  I think that this is correct.  They are planning on spending some money on some infrastructure projects, that is nice but not enough.  So they have the option of giving money to the banks or mailing out check.  Both options will not have a large effect.  So here is my idea.  DON’T give people check, and DON’T give the money to the banks.  Just simply change the format of the money, send out the stimulus in the form of Debit Cards.  This means that they have to spend the money, they can’t use the card to pay off their debts, they can’t save it because it will expire in 120 days.  Also the money will not go the massive hidden black market, they won’t gamble with it, they won’t spend it on drugs.  They will buy stuff with it.  This helps the legit businesses stay afloat, and they will pay taxes on the sales and profits.

This idea even has more benfitial effects.  First people with out bank account will be able to use it with out having to go to a check cashing store.  It also allows the government to track where the spending goes.

This is not a new idea.  I first heard about it because of a story about the stimulus in Hong Kong, they used this method and it wored really well.  After writing half of this blog I did a search for it and found out that Glenn Beck on CNN also talked about.  Even FEMA used debit cards to help the katrina evacuees.

Of course people may spend it on stupid things.  And I am sure some landlords will quickly figure out how to collect rent from a debit card, and of course some people will simply pay 3% and transfer the money to their PayPal account and then transfer it back to their checking account and use the cash, but the majority of people will simply spend it normally.

So the bottom line, is if we must be sending money out in bulk to the population then this is the best way to do it.  I still think that this is not an effective stimulus and really should not be done

It is the cashflow stupid.

Business, concepts, Entrepreneurship, Money, Real Estate,

My friend Adrian posted a very good blog entry about cash flow.  His blog is one that everyone who is serious about being wealthy should subscribe to.  I made and answer to him that point out how stupid so many investors are.  I wanted to share it with all of my readers also so here it is.

Read his entry HERE.

Here is what I replied with….

I have seem this time and again in commercial real estate.  People are willing to leave a strip mall mostly empty, they are unwilling to do short term leases, or even to discount the leases.  So what happens, there are tons of strip malls, and office buildings here in Arizona that are empty.  They have this mindset that if they get a nice long lease that it will be better than the money now.  This may have been the case in the past but to me it just seems so stupid.

An example is a building I was thinking of renting back in 2002.  It was perfect for a business idea I had, I had the backers and was ready to go, I just wanted 6 months rent free and then to rent it for $12k per month, going up 5% per year.  They would not budge on their price of $18k.  It was too much so I passed.  Well now it is 2009 and it is STILL empty, no one has EVER rented it.

Another example is a strip mall that I know of.  It is very poorly designed but has over 400k square foot in total.  Less than 50k square foot is rented out.  A guy I know rented a 8k square foot space, and put a Filipino restaurant and grocery there.  Soon the space next door was rented by another Filipino to build a karaoke club for Filipinos.  It was all located in a part of the strip mall that was totally empty.  The grocery store invested everything they had, over 300k into building out their store and stocking it.  Then the economy hit them, and they could not pay the rent.  On the 15th day of the month the landlord locked them out, charged a penalty and the guy could not come up with the 20k needed, over 50k in food spoiled and they guy was promptly out of business, and the guy next door also moved out  The place is now empty.  So what did the owner of the property have to loose to give the guy some time to catch up, maybe some discounted rent.  He would surely not be making less than he is making right now, he has over 300,000 sq foot of other places to rent out, most of which are better.  It was dumb and short sighted, but that seems to be the majority of commercial landlords, especially the distant ones who never even see the property.

I think of tenants as clients.  They pay you and you should keep them happy.  You have only limited supply so when you are full you can be more selective and follow the rules to the letter, but when no one is buying your product you need to sell at any price to make money, they still like to keep rent high, and if it not rented then they take the tax break at the higher level.  That is illogical to me, but maybe that is why I am not as wealthy as they are.  Or maybe they are just huge REITs playing the game with other peoples money and they don’t really care that much.

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