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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Theft by technology.

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For years now my printer of choice has always been a laser printer.  I like the faster speed, more quiet printing and the quality of the output.   The drawback of any printer is that it needs to use ink or toner.  Companies know that you need it, and they also know that they can make a cartrage that works perfect stop working by design.  Designing a way to make something stop working is one of my most hated things in the world.

HP is by far the worst offender at this.  They design their printers to count the pages, and then stop working when they reach a specific number and force you to buy more ink, even if your cartage works perfect they make it stop working by putting a chip on it that tells the printer that is has printed enough pages, even if it is still half full.  This makes is almost impossible to refill or even recycle the cartridges, they simply need a new chip that can only be had from HP.  Lexmark recently sued a company that made chips that worked with their printers.    In Europe these chips are ILLEGAL, because it blocks recycling.

For this reason I have avoided all HP printers for many years.  So I have this trusty brother printer.  It was a really good deal and prints fast and with high quality, but today it stopped working.  It flashed the toner light, and said toner low.  I was just finished with a print job and it worked perfect, nice and perfect then all of a sudden it stopped.  I had to print something really important so I kept turning off and on the printer, I even took out the toner a few times and it would power up and do a test then say flash the toner light.  After I while I decided to search the web and after a ton of research I found that other people were able to fix this.

brother-hl-2140-toner
How brother steals your money

It is so simple.  Look at the photo, in the center there is a hole, the printer shines a light into this hole, it bounces off of a mirror on the other side and then a detector will tell you the toner is bad if it sees light.  But as you can tell the whole is rather high up.  So you could have toner for 100’s more pages left in there.  So I simply took a black sticker, folded it up and blocked the whole, and guess what, my printer prints perfect now!

I know that they are out there to make a buck, they don’t make money on the printer, but they sell the toner cartridges for WAY too much money to compensate.  They design them to fail and this makes them last much less.   This makes the cartridge cost more, due to the added complexity of the mirror and lens.  It makes the printer cost more to make.  It even makes them put more in the landfills.  But it lets them sell many more cartridges.  At least brother is easier to fool than HP.

If you are reading this because you have the same problem I know this will help.  I would ask that you let me know that this helped you by posting a reply, it is easy and free.

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

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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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The Generation Gap and the Church

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That is a huge and growing Generation Gap in the United States.  They have been talking about this at church recently.  About how there is a “Missing” Generation in the churches of America.  How people from 19 years old until 35 are vastly underrepresented.  I am in that group, and I agree, we are vastly underrepresented.

A Quick Warning: This blog entry will be about averages and the groups as a whole, there will always be exceptions to every case but generally the following is true.  I deal with the general public all of the time and I have had friends of many different ages.  I will use the way a church operates during this entry to show the differences.   Watch this video to see facts about the world you may not know.  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8]

The older generation simply does a poor job of relating to our generation.  There are some fundamental ways that we think differently, and these differences get in the way often.

Interactive vs Broadcast

To me the most profound difference is the way that we interact with other people and with the world.  For most of those over the age of 35 the world was mostly a broadcast world.  People made TV Shows, made newspapers, books, and gave sermons, and you sat there and watched or listened.  You appreciated what was going on and that was it.

But the mindset of the people under the age of 35 is an interactive one.  We grew up with video games and soon after computers.  We decided what we would watch, what we would listen to, and when.  We want the world to work together.  In corporate America this has created the power of teams, almost every successful business puts people in my generation in teams, and empowers those teams to make some decisions.  This is why the most successful show on tv is American Idol, we want to vote to see who stays on.  We have YouTube and Video On Demand, so we can watch anything we want on out time table.

The successful church must realize that for people in this generation the Sermon is just the introduction to the conversation, and they must make ways for the conversation to go on and to get the input When they don’t we simply feel frustrated.  Our generation is very tech savvy so even if they brought the conversation online afterward it would much better than the way it is cut off now.   The older generation is done, and ready to move on.  The successful churches introduce the topic and start the discussion online days before the sermon on the pastors blog, and comments are posted and replied to, so when the sermon comes on sunday my generation is excited to go and see it to see if what we said made a difference, it makes us hunger for it and we are sure to attend. I am talking about much more than just saying Amen here and there.  Actually that looks kinda fake to us.  I often feel like a pastor is up there trying to answer all of the questions that he thinks that the audience may have but never bothers to ask them what their questions are.

Values

On Tuesday night on ABC they have a show called “What would you do”, it is basically a hidden camera show where they set up situations to test peoples ethics.  On the show they said that one of my generations main values is the Value of Tolerance.   Our generation is very diverse, and people often express their thoughts by how they dress.  I really don’t think that the older generations gets that we really don’t care that much on how you dress.  We will take how you look and make some preconceived notions but if your actions are different we quickly can change that.  Who cares how you look, it is about who you are.  I think that much of this comes from the fact that successful people in our generation come with all sorts of different looks and different backgrounds.  I basically will treat you the same if you wear a suit, or if you wear torn shorts and a old raged shirt as long as you act the same.  I think that much of this also comes from the fact that we carry on most of our relationships online or on the phone.  I have people I have talked to for hundreds of hours over a period of more than 5 years, who I have done business with, who I joke with and have tried to inspire and build a relationship, but whom I have NEVER met in person and never even seen a photo.  I think that concept is totally foreign to people in older generations.

Another main value of my generation is Truth.  Being real, being authentic.  I think that we are much harder to offend than people of older generations.  We want to get to the point, to get real.  The point where it starts to get good for us is well past the point where older people get offended.  One thing I find very lame in church is that pastors stop way too early, they stop before they get to the meat, or the truth because if they do keep going on someone may get offended and walk away, but in doing this they look weak to our generation, unwilling to be authentic for fear of what others may think.  Remember that our generation is the generation of tolerance, and because of that we are hard to offend, plus we have seen it all and heard it all on TV and on our computers.  For us it is about community, we know that no church is perfect, and no church leader is perfect, and that it is OK to have opinions that are different than the leaders.  Older people want to find the church leader that thinks exactly like them, and for this reason the leaders usually are reluctant to take a stand, this keeps the older generation from leaving but it looks completely fake to my generation and turns us off.

One huge value of older folks is that of Authority.  But to us we know that the world has become interactive, and that for many decades we have been betrayed by authority giving false information, and because of this we doubt everything.  For the boomers you just tell them that something is true and they run with it, but we research it, we have Goggle at our fingertips and we use it, 23 Billions times a month on average.   We know that big companies can have no web site at all and we know that a guy running a business in his underwear in his dining room can have an impressive and huge website.  We know that some crazy person can edit Wikipedia and change the information you are reading.  We also know that an unknown with a good idea can publish it and have a million readers in a few days.  For most of us there is no ultimate authority or truth, it is just millions of interpretations of truth.  This is the very reason that it so very hard for the church to reach us.  First there is only a broadcast, no conversation, and when they broadcast they tell us what is their truth, but their truth is different from what others have said and they do little to prove their truth.  They read something out of the bible to people who may not truly believe the bible is truth, they have heard so much that discredits it.  Again this is why a conversation works much better than a broadcast.

Another value of our generation is that of Equality and fairness.  Most of us believe that everyone should have an equal chance at success, that we should all have a say in things.  We all want a turn to share what we know, we want to be empowered.  In business school there were a lot of good lessons, and one that stuck with me the most is delegation.  First if you are a leader you need to delegate as much as you can, you cast the purpose and vision of the company and then delegate to smart people who have bought into that vision and give them the power and freedom to do what it takes to make you successful and the results will always be more than you ever thought it could be.  If we don’t know the WHY to a task, and how our efforts fit into the big picture than we feel like what we do is not so important so we just don’t do it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODQ4WiDsEBQ]  Another virtue of our generation, and one that has caused some of the largest generation conflicts is the Ubuntu concept.  People in my generation see the world as one huge mass of humanity.  We should be helpful to others, we should share with others, we should build a community of caring, trust and unselfishness.  An African word has been used for many decades to express this concept, that word is Ubuntu.  Recently a group of programmers took this concept and named their operating system after it, because they built their entire OS on this concept of community.   They call the OS Ubuntu, in a few short years it is already better than windows, and as more things work with it it is gaining market share, recently passing the Mac OS as the second most used OS, and I think that it will overtake Windows as the most popular OS in the world in the next decade.   People in my generation make stuff so that it can be useful to others, and we don’t care if they use those things, and for the same reason we don’t ask if we can use what you made, we download your music, and your movies and use them however we see fit.  An open society is in direct conflict with the current system of copyrights.  Some smart companies are releasing their content to the web, and letting people change it and build on it, making those companies totally hip and cool.  While other go after and sue people who do the exact same thing, GM recently after people liked one of their commercials so much that it was posted on youtube and 3 million people viewed it, then they sued to take it down, are they that dumb.  (Well I did see their stock price recently so I guess that is my answer.)

We are used to information on demand.  I can access more information from my desk in 20 minutes than what would take a whole day in the library of congress just 20 years ago.  We are a generation that is flooded with information and rich content, but at the same time we yearn for a real human connection.  We don’t just want to sit in a lecture but we want to be part of the conversation and push it forward.

Final Thoughts

There is a verse in the bible that goes “Teach a child in the way he should go and he will not depart.”  By the time someone turns 21 they have formed 95% of their habits, and generally decided where their life is going.  For 100’s of years church was the center of society, but in the 1960’s it started to fade, there was a leadership crisis and for the first time the population as a whole doubted if we would be involved in a war.  Until the 1950’s most expression was banned, and by the 1960’s it was unleashed, and there was a new culture that was raised up, one without God at the center.  The people who were teens during this time did not go to church much and did not make it important to their kids.  The concept of church lost critical mass, it was very uncool to go to church.  Almost everyone that I know under the age of 35 is in church because they grew up in church, very few found church later on.  Now we have millions of “Unchurched” in our generation, many have never been to church or when they did they felt like they went to a lecture, they made no connection, they felt like they had no say in anything so they just never went back, and they took that opinion with them.

To reach these people is a very hard task now, because they feel that they are doing fine now, and that they don’t need God.  Many churches express God like a Magic Gene who solves all of your problems.  My current church is not like this but many churches I have visited basically have the same theme over and over, “Life is hard, life is tough, the world is unfair and against you and you need to make God part of your life so he can fix it.”  I hate it when I hear people say this.  To my generation life is awesome and great, we have more at our finger tips now than even existed for our parents, we are generally happy with out lot in life.  The message that would work for us is this “God can be your best friend, he will help you when you need it and celebrate with you when you do good, he has great plans for your future, full of hope and success.  The better you follow His advice the closer you will get to His vision for you life.  Join us and you will have an entire community at your side working to make God will happen in your life.”  Too bad few churches today are preaching this.  I love how we say in our church “Success to you and Success to the kingdom of God”  Because that is really what it is all about, lining up our definition of success with that of what will create success in the kingdom and then going for it.

The church that successfully reaches my generation will be the one that speaks the truth holding nothing back, allows us to participate in the conversation, allows us to discover what is truth, and allows us to all work together to build a community, getting rid of the idea of leaders and followers.

What is in a techs mind when they work on a problem?

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I don’t know in the startup, reboot, same problem. Check the other computer on the router, works perfect. Downloading Firefox on good computer, putting it on thumb drive and loading it on broken computer. Still does not work. Still able to ping google. Resetting all internet settings, no luck. Turning off wireless and using Cat5 cable. Still pings google, but browser does not work. Going back to wireless. Hmmm, what is next?

Let me take the computer home and try it on my home router. OK same thing. Lets try to browse the network, ok this does NOT work either. OK time fore more software. Lets see what HijackThis says. Well two things I see really quick… IERESET.INF with a ton of options that are not so good, also some DLASX_W.DLL, used for a dlink wireless the client tried to get working before I came over. I am going to remove everything other than Norton and Google toolbar. Lets reboot. Same thing. Ok let’s use google to find out more ideas. Running the reset command on the TCP/IP connection. Still broken. Reboot, still broken. OK, resetting the DNS. No help. Is it just port 80, hmm lets test some other program, does RDC work…no, ok so more ports.

Now looking for a tool to reset winsock, ok found a great one, let me pop in my thumb drive. Oops electric shock, blue screen, just rebooted my main computer. Uggg. Well now it is time to install that new DVD burner I bought the other day. Ok done, all up again. OK running the winsock reset, reboot, ping works, ugg browser still broken. This is getting very lame. OK I have some reg tools but I never had them fix much, but worth a try now, we are desperate. Running RegCure, found 894 errors and fixed them. Broken, rebooting, still broken, as expected.

Well I know it is software, but lets see if an Ubuntu live CD will work on this, plus I can test my new burner. The new burner is very fast, only 2:44 to burn, about 2 min faster than my old one. While burning I typed net view, and got error 6118, let me look into that. Nothing really there for browser problems. Did a search for the firefox error message “Though the site seems valid, the browser was unable to establish a connection.” And I got a large number of good information. A bit more research and it seems that Norton has caused this problem for other people, so let me download the Norton removal tool and see if that helps. This is most hopeful I have been that we have a solution, but it is taking forever to do. Ok, done, rebooting, crossing fingers. Yippie, it worked. Stupid Norton, I always hated that thing. So cool now.

Wow, I knew I would get it eventually, but that took a long time. It totally works now, just tested everything out, no problems. I am now installing AVG so the client has a bit of AV protection. Also going to run Windows Update, he has been offline for months with this problem.  Never got to try Ubuntu on this one.

I have had similar problems in the past, and it seems that it was a different fix each time. But if you found this blog because you had the problem listed above try some of the things here, it may just work.

CLICK HERE for the removal tool I used to remove norton.

CLICK HERE for the winsock reset tool.

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

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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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It is the cashflow stupid.

Business, concepts, Entrepreneurship, Investment, 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.