Bryan C. Fleming

No matter how much you love your work, you need to take some time to recharge yourself. You simply can’t work all the time. You become too inefficient. You need to remove yourself from the day-to-day grind too see things from a new perspective. By taking time away from your work, you’ll actually work smarter and get more done.

Consider the word Recreation and break it down:

Re – Creation – Recreation will really allow you to re-create.

So, give yourself some well-deserved recreation this weekend and enjoy the 4th of July Holiday.

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Discipline is hard to come by today. Particularly when it comes to finances. We all want everything right now. We buy it on easy to get credit. We tell ourselves we’ll pay for it down the road when we get some extra money. Of course, those days never come.

But when it is OK to go get that new Big Screen TV or that swimming pool for the family?

Your first rule should be to always pay cash for these extras. Never put them on credit. That’s just immature and shows a lack of self-discipline. Plus, when the newness wears off, you just have another bill to pay.

So first pay cash, and second, set a goal to get it.

You know, why not use that burning desire to pull you forward. Set a goal! Let’s look at a big screen TV. Here’s how you could set a goal to get it:

“I will get the Sony 62-inch TV once I get my first landscaping customer”

Or

“I will get a new Computer after I have invested $1,000 into the stock market”

Or even…

“I will get a new Mercedes Benz E320 when I buy and sell my first investment property”

Do you see the power in these? The desire will give you the reason to do something you don't want to do. Now, it goes without saying that your goal should be in line with your accomplishment. Start small and go from there.

I had a cell phone that I absolutely hated. I really wanted a new camera phone. I thought they were so cool. But I wouldn’t let myself get it until I sold my first copy of a shareware program I wrote. It forced me to pull some long nights to get that program out the door. It forced me to improve it. Then the first sale came in and I ran down to the Sprint store and buy my $50 phone. Of course, the software program paid for that cell phone many times over. It still makes money to this day.

Remember, being financially disciplined doesn’t mean you can’t have any fun. In the end you’ll have more fun. You’ll force yourself to make more money and you’ll be further ahead. Once you make the switch you’ll never look back!

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A friend of mine, Alex is a young ambitious guy. He’s just getting started out with his first corporate job and he’s pretty fired up about it. I asked him today if he’s putting money into his company’s 401K plan. He said he thought about it, but didn’t because he wanted to buy a condo. We did some math and he could hardly believe that $100 a week could earn him $211,000 a month by the time he was 73 years old.

Let’s consider his $20 million dollar fortune. Did he have to out and invent the next Google? Did he have to struggle to become the CEO? Nope.

The only thing it required him to do was show up Monday morning and work his job. In fact, he doesn’t even have to try for a raise. He can blow his paycheck on anything he wants. He will still end up wildly rich.

If you can put money into a 401K at your job and don’t, you’re screwing up. It’s because you think you don’t have enough money. Might I suggest that you don’t have a money-making problem, you have a money-spending problem. Making money is easy. Not spending it is very hard. Especially in this day and age.

401K plans are great because they protect you from yourself. Your company’s payroll department takes the money before you go and spend it! It’s brilliant.

You must have the discipline to save 10% of everything you make if you want to get rich. That’s the magic pill you’re looking for. It’s a principle. When you finally decide to start saving, there will be two hard moments. Both are brief, but you’ll have to overcome them. First, is probably right now as you’re sitting here trying to justify all the reasons you can’t save 10 cents of every dollar. The next one will be your first pay-check after you decide to do it. Notice I said first check. After the second check you’ll never miss the money. The pain is over and you’re on track to being a millionaire.

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Fortune Magazine has a great write-up this month about retirement. Now, I recently wrote about the Baby Boomers having on average $44,000 saved for retirement. But you can’t really get that mad at them. After all, they grew up when everyone believed in pensions and social security.

So how do you fix this mess?

Answer: Let the media ‘sell’ people on the idea that it’s far better to just keep working!

“Who needs retirement anyways?”

“It’s over-rated, statistically you won’t live as long if you retire”

On and on they’ll go…

Keep an eye on this. It will be interesting to watch how this gets played out more and more in the coming years.

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Human beings are funny creatures. Rarely do we use logic to decide much of anything. We are all fueled by emotion.

Pride, ego, self-esteem, and judgment help form our beliefs. We hold on to them dearly. Let’s keep this in mind the next time we decide to tell someone he or she is wrong.

When we tell people they are wrong, that man or women will take it as a personal insult. They will dig in, fight, and argue to protect their belief. It’s an attack on their ego. It won’t do anyone any good.

Instead try this approach. Say nothing! That’s right just sit there and let that fellow boast on and on. Listen to what he’s really saying. You’ll find he’s only starving to have his precious ego fed.

Why is it that we all find it so gratifying to tell someone he or she is wrong? Why is it that we’re so quick to find fault with other people?

Yes, human nature is a funny thing. The next time we feel the urge to tell someone they’re wrong, let’s take a step back. Let them get the psychological sunshine they need. We might just find it makes our day a little nicer too.

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Here’s an article on CNN Money. We should be thinking about what will happen to economy when the baby boomers retire. Will we hear a giant sucking sound as they pull their life savings out of the stock market?

Then I read in this article:

“The median amount in a boomer's 401(k) is just over $44,000, according to Hewitt Associates, an employee-benefits consulting group”

It looks like the Baby Boomers aren’t going to retire any time soon.


Tags:Business, Career, Investing, Money

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Perhaps you started a business or made some good investments. The money is starting to pour in. Now it’s time to quit your job right?

If this is you, follow this rule:

Go One Year without cashing a paycheck from your job

Why?

After having a year under your belt you’ll know if you can survive the ups and downs of your new venture. I’ve never seen one that produces the exact same amount of money every month like a job. They all fluctuate.

In that one-year’s time you’re not spending your paychecks. Put them in the bank. Then you’ll have money to fall back on if you need it.

Too many people I know leave their day jobs too early only to regret it a few months later. Don’t put yourself in this situation.

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If you’re looking for a good read check out http://aprivateportfolio.blogspot.com. Here’s a guy that’s out there building passive income. He’s going VIA Real Estate. Not a bad route.

Ironically, I have friend who left his corporate job yesterday. Yes he walked out because he has enough passive income from property rentals to pay his bills. I’m very proud of him. He’s been talking about this for years. I’m sure there were times he wanted to quit. Times it was hard.

But he did it.

Now he has the freedom to do whatever he wants. The best part is he’s only in his 30’s.

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A few days ago we were discussing saving 10% of your money. That’s the only way you’ll get rich.

Let me ask you, have you started yet?

Perhaps this article might help from YourMoney2Keep.com

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Doesn’t it amaze you how many people spend their day working a job (or business) they don’t like? Think about it. These people spend most of their time doing something they don’t even like to do.

Let me ask you, do you think these people will excel?

If there is one thing you must do to become successful it’s find something you like to do and do it well. Work should be enjoyable not a bore. You should enjoy getting out of bed in the morning and looking forward to each day.

We’ve been talking about getting rich and how you may need to change where you make your money. Might I suggest you start here. Find something you like to do and make a business out of it. If you like sports, sell sporting equipment. If you like music, build a business around that.

Why am I making such a big deal about this? Because whatever you do, it will take a lot of work for you to be successful in it. If you don’t like it, you’ll never put in the work.

Back in 2000, I started building a business that I didn’t like. It was a great opportunity, but I just found the work difficult and not enjoyable. Do you know what happened to that business? It didn’t go anywhere. My heart just wasn’t into it.

I like computers and building things. That’s what I do. I make about 60 times more money doing what I like, than I did in that other business. You know what else, it doesn’t even feel like work. I find it fun.

That’s what you should be doing; having fun. Life’s too short to live it any other way. So, let’s agree to do what we love and the money will follow.

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We’ve been talking about some guiding principles that will make you rich. Of course, we’re covering them quickly, but I’m trying to open your mind to a different way of thinking. As you read this, bear in mind that we live in a world where 95% of the people out there don’t do what I’ve told you. They end up working hard with nothing to show for it at the end of their lives. You don’t want that do you? You want to end up rich right?

Now, there is one more principle that I want to cover in this series. Without following this you simply won’t ever get rich. As I said before, you might make a lot of money, but you won’t get rich.

Let me ask you, why do you want to get rich? Really think about it. Could it be to get some financial pressure off your back? Would you just like an extra $100,000 in a bank account? I’ll bet you would.

You see most people spend everything they make. No matter how much money they make, they spend it. That’s why they want to make more money. They think it will solve their problem. It won’t. I know, you’re thinking, “Come on Bryan, If I’m making an extra $5,000 a month I won’t have any money problems”. This will be true for a little while. But, your spending habits will catch with you. A downturn in your business or job and all the sudden you have money problems again.

The good news is, by using this one principle you’ll certainly be rich. Here it is:

“Save 10 percent of what you earn”

Engrain this into your thinking. Above all else do this. Start today. Open a free account with http://www.ingdirect.com/. It’s easy to do and they offer the best savings rates of any bank I’ve seen. Set it up to take 10% out of your pay automatically every week. Here’s why:

Why do you think the government takes taxes out of your paycheck? Why don’t they trust you to just pay them at the end of the year? What do they know that you don’t know?

I’ll tell you what they know: They know you’ll spend the money! They want to get paid before you spend it on a new big-screen TV.

Do yourself a favor. Pay yourself first. You’re more important than anyone else. You’re more important than Visa, Master Card, or a new computer. These things will take care of themselves. You’ll always find a way to pay them.

I can hear you now, “But Bryan I can’t save 10% I don’t even have enough money now”. You know something, everyone feels that way. But, I’ll give you a tip: You only have to get by for 4 weeks. After that you’ll never miss the money. I know you can’t believe this, but it’s true. That’s the magic of saving and paying yourself first.

Here’s another Tip: If you don’t build the habit now, it will be harder to build when you do start making more money. Do you really think it’s easier to save $1,000 a month out of $10,000? It’s not. It’s much easier to save $50 out of $500.

When you do this, the money will build up. Even just by working a regular job you’ll end up richer and richer as time passes. In fact anyone who simply did this, at any income level, would amass a fortune. If you think about it, it really seems silly that something so simple; something that takes 5 minutes to set up will make you rich. Nobody does it because they can let go of that 10%.

Start saving 10% of what you earn today. If you don’t do this, you’ll never get rich! When you do it, you’ll wonder how you lived your life any other way.

Go back and read Part Four

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Over the last few days we’ve learned that you can’t just go out and work hard to get rich. You need to work smart too. You do this by putting effort into projects that will earn you passive-leveraged income.

The downside is that this kind of money is tricky to make because you’ll put in a lot of work up front before you ever make a dime. Hopefully, you’ve been thinking “What can I do today to start building passive income so I can get rich?”

As I alluded to, there are a lot of good opportunities out there. Here are a few to hopefully get your mind thinking:

Internet Businesses – This is single best place where you can start building a passive income stream. You can start looking online right now for business ideas. Many of them don’t require hardly any money to start, but they do take a lot of work. My only tip for you is to stay away from anything that sounds too good to be true.

Real-Estate – Buy a house and rent it out. Yes, those late night infomercials are on to something. Again, expect to do a lot of work. It’s not easy money like the late-night snake oil salesmen like to tell you.

Stocks – This one will take money. But if you start small you can build a fortune. Here you’re leveraging money.

Franchises – Again, this one will take some money, but franchises already have a proven system in place. You’ll most likely work like a dog for a few years before your business gets off the ground. Then you’ll begin to enjoy the passive income it can bring.

I’m sure there are more, but these come to mind pretty quickly.

The most important thing is that start looking. Keep your eyes open for opportunities; they are everywhere.

There is one final principle that you’ll need to become rich. Without it, you’ll just make a lot of money and I’ll talk about that in my next article. Please read the next article. It will make the single biggest difference in your life if everything else fails.

Go Back and read Part Three or continue reading Part Five

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We’ve been looking at different incomes and hopefully you’re seeing that leveraged passive income will make you much richer than trading time for money.

So why don’t more people do this?

Partially, it’s because they don’t know. But society plays a big part too. Consider that most people spend way too many hours watching TV. On a TV show the crime is solved in a ½ hour. Someone instantly wins a million dollars. A home gets remodeled in 30 minutes. TV is teaching us to expect things to happen almost instantly. People expect life to work that way too.

Here’s the problem with leveraged passive income:


You will put a lot of work into earning passive income before you make any money. In the beginning, you do a lot of work for free without any proof that it will earn you any money down the road.

There it is. It’s just that simple. You see, at a job, you work 40 hours (or more) your first week. You wait about a week or two, and then you get paid. A passive income project could take years before you see your first dime. People just get impatient. How long would you show up to work if you didn’t get a paycheck? For most people I’d bet they wouldn’t work longer than a month for a company if they didn’t get paid right away.

If you were to graph most passive income projects they look like this:

In the beginning you don’t make hardly any money. But years down the road (read that again, I did say years), your passive income can exceed what you make at your job. Now you have time and money. By most standards you’re rich!

You now have free time to make more money if you want, or you can slow down and enjoy life a little more.

Hopefully I’ve sold you on the idea of working for a worthwhile passive income project and not simply working for money. In the next article we’ll look at few ways you can start generating this precious income. Some of them take more money than others, but I assure you that even with no money you can build a substantial passive income stream if you simply stick to it.

Go Back and Read Part Two or continue reading Part Four

Business

Career

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Yesterday we looked at a principle called Leverage. We learned that people who use leverage could get richer than those who don’t.

Today we’re going to learn about another concept. This one has to do with what type of money you are earning.

Essentially, there are two types of incomes you can earn. They are Active Income and Passive Income.

Active Income is money you get for doing something. It’s much like non-leveraged income. You work and hour, you get paid for an hour. Like we’ve already discussed, this type of income is very limited because you only have so many hours in a week.

Passive Income is money you earn today from something you’ve done in the past. This is also called residual income. You might be asking “How can I get paid today for something I’ve done a year ago?”

Think about Elvis Presley. He made a lot of money this year even though he’s been dead for some time. He (or his family) gets a small percentage of money from all his record, CD, and Tape sales. He made the original recordings decades ago.

Now, I know you’re sitting there thinking “Great. I can’t do what he did. He was a rock star!” This may be true, but the idea is to start thinking in these terms. In the next article you will learn about different ways of generating passive income that you or anybody could do. The good news is you live in a time where this type of income has never been easier to make. In fact it’s a heck of a lot easier for you than it was for Elvis! There are a lot of average Joes living some pretty amazing lifestyles and getting plenty rich off passive income.

At this point you should be thinking about how you make your money. You want to put all your work into building up income that is leveraged and passive. Of course you may need to feed your family right now and you may need to work a regular job for some non-leveraged active income. That’s fine. You just want to start putting more work into income that will pay off years from now rather than just making a quick buck.

Ask yourself: What Kind of Money do I make? What percentage is leveraged? What percentage is Passive? This will give you a big clue into how Rich you can become!

Back to reading Part One or continue reading Part Three


Business
Career

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It seems everywhere you turn lately somebody’s got a plan to make you Rich. People seem to think money will take away their problems. Truthfully, it will not, but if money problems are keeping you up at night then something must be done. As the saying goes “Whatever you’re doing isn’t working”.

Let’s look at a big reason why some people become rich and most don’t.

Have you ever wondered why some people seem to get ahead so easily, while other struggle? Why do some people work so hard, but have so little to show for it? One of the big reasons is Leverage.

So what is Leverage?

When it comes to making a buck, leverage has to do with getting more out than you put in. It’s usually from using other people’s time or borrowing other people’s money. You can leverage someone’s money and make a good investment. You can sell a big job, pay someone else to do the work and keep the profit.

Without leverage you simply can’t get rich because there are only 168 hours in a week. Many people only know how to work more hours. Take a doctor for example; we’ll call him Dr. Bob. Perhaps Dr. Bob can charge $150 per hour for his time. He could make $25,000 per week if he worked every single hour, which of course is entirely impossible. But you get the point.

Hourly workers get stuck in another pinch. You end up trading time for money. Dr. Bob might have money, but he doesn’t have any free time. He’s money rich and time broke. We really want both don’t we?

Dr. Bob could hire three junior Doctors and pay them $100 per hour. He could keep the other $50 per hour for himself. Effectively he earns the same $150 per hour for doing nothing. Of course it’s not that easy, but you can see how leverage could let Dr. Bob enjoy the summer on his new Yacht. What would happen if he had five junior doctors working for him? How about 20 or 100?

If you want to get rich you need to think this way. This is a natural law just like gravity. When you drop a ball it always falls down, it never falls up!

To you, leveraged income should be worth 10 times more than hourly income even if it’s only a few dollars a month to start with. Why? Because you can grow a few dollars into empire by using more leverage. It gets even better because as your leveraged income grows you get more free time. That’s something Dr. Bob will never have!

Read Part Two

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This is still a ‘work-in-progress’ but here it goes:

Bryan Fleming’s First Law of Spam: The amount of Spam an Internet System receives is in proportion to its popularity. It is also inversely proportional to the cost of sending a message through that system.

So let’s start testing this:

A big system that’s free will get a lot of Spam. Think about these:

- Email (Check)
- Search Engines (Check)
- Blogs (Check) – ever heard of comment Spam? How about Splogs (Spam-Blogs)?
- Instant Messaging (Check)
- Chat Rooms (Check)
- Hmm… I wonder how My-Space is doing??

Now let’s think of some big systems that cost money:

- Yahoo paid directory ($300 a year). No Spam there…
- Google Ad-sense. We’ll there’s certainly less Spam as the cost per keyword increases.

Of course the only reason little systems don’t get Spam is because they’re not popular yet.

I’m going to keep working on this one, but I think I’m on to something here. If anyone thinks I’m wrong. Tell me!

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Net-Neutrality: Do you think it bothers your Internet provider when you make calls over the Internet free? Then you turn around and cancel their phone service?

Services like Vonage offer unlimited phone usage for about $25 a month. This is much cheaper than a home phone line. Ebay is doing the same thing with a service called Skype, which is completely free. It’s called VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and it has the phone companies burning mad.

Net-Neutrality is the principle that if you’re paying your phone company for Internet access, they cannot block data because they don’t like the websites or Internet Services you’re using. You can learn more about it here.

This is a red-hot topic in Washington as phone companies pay off politicians to push through a law allowing them to block VOIP traffic.

Interestingly this practice was made illegal in Europe, but is still up in the air in the old U.S.A.

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Pam runs a great blog called Escape from Cubicle Nation. It talks about people wanting to leave their day job and start their own business. It’s a great read.

Today she has a post about weather or not a college degree matters in business.

My opinion is that a college degree is great for the job market, but has nothing to do with the business world. Consider this…..

When you go to college, think about who’s teaching you?

Are these people successful business owners themselves? If so, why are they working for $50K a year?

Here’s my point: If I’ve never done something myself, how can I teach you how to do it?

A better plan: Find someone who’s living the lifestyle you want, and offer to buy him or her a cup of coffee. They’ll tell you exactly how to do it! It costs a lot less than a college degree and you’ll gain so much more.

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