Work Babble

3 Things About Money You Must Know Before Making It

Guest post by David Weber, Founder of www.learnaboutflow.com

Like it or not, you have to deal with money in order to survive in this world. And since the beginning of time everyone and his brother has had “the answer” as to how to make money, lots of money.

The reality? Money is not what people think it is. The majority of people think money is all that matters, even if they don’t admit it.  This isn’t just about greed, although that comes up. People who obsess about coupons or endlessly worry about their retirement savings are trapped in the same viscous cycle as those who insist they have a better car than their neighbors do.

That’s why understanding these three tenets of money is so crucial to your success.

#1 Money is neutral, neither good nor bad

This literally changed my life when I first discovered this. It’s so tempting to think that those with money are blessed, and that those who are without are cursed. The truth is money is 100% neutral. That’s why you can take $1 and spend it on a stripper, on charity, on a treat for yourself or to gamble on a football game. The dollar is the same, what you do with it isn’t. You can think of money as more of a tool, like a hammer. If you hit your thumb with a hammer is it the hammer’s fault? Likewise, if you build a house using a hammer does the hammer deserve all the credit? No, it’s just a tool and one that is neutral.

#2 Money is not the end goal, ever

You will never succeed if money is your only goal. If your goal is to make $100,000 a year or a $1 million a year, achieving that goal will be meaningless unless the other aspects of your life are in place. Therefore, while you may (and I do mean MAY) be financially secure, if you were depressed, anxious, angry or in any other state prior to achieving the goal you will still be that way. In other words, money isn’t going to solve your core issues.

#3 Hard work = money? Not really.

Most people were raised with the belief that if you work hard you will be rewarded, especially with money. The reality is quite different. Think about it. You could “work hard” at Wal-Mart or McDonald’s for decades and still not make what an A-list celebrity (who is also “working hard”) makes in one month. Mix in things like winning a lottery or picking the right stock, and “working hard” for money makes little sense. Solution? Work smart, but make sure it is work you are passionate about. The money will flow afterwards.

The point is your success comes from everything BUT money — money will always follow if you do what you love to do naturally. Anything else will just create severe blockages in your life.

Author Bio
David spent over 20 years as a copywriter and brand strategist, working with two-person startups, Fortune 10 multinationals, and everything in-between. His work generated tens of millions of dollars in sales, and helped launch numerous products, services and even companies. During his career he had the opportunity to hold more than 30,000+ conversations with thousands of people including global leaders, billionaires, and other truly successful types. Through his research David discovered the “something else” of success — the concept of flow, your true life’s purpose. Only flow could explain why some people succeed and others don’t, even given the same circumstances.  

For more information about David, including videos, and a free report, visit www.learnaboutflow.com. You can also purchase his book, My Life Has No Purpose (Which is Why You’re Doing Great) on Amazon.

Lay off and the Holidays

 

By Tony Deblauwe

Getting laid off is never easy, but December is probably the most stressful month for this to occur. When most people get the news, a range of reactions occur more intensely because of the time of the year. If you find yourself a recent lay off statistic, of all the decisions you have to make, the most important is to first address your emotional reactions and how it impacts your loved ones.  

Resentment, anger, concern about the future, and depression are all real issues to contend with and can damage close relationships. This may be the time to call a trusted friend so you can blow off some steam before you talk to your family. That way, you will be emotionally available to help your spouse through his/her initial shock at hearing about your job loss. You can’t both spiral out of control at the same time because this can lead to fighting and finger pointing. Your relationship needs to be stronger than ever after receiving such news.

A quick way to offset your initial emotional reactions and that of your spouse is to take one action the same day you are laid off to make a practical improvement to your situation. This could be filing for unemployment benefits or sitting down with your spouse to review the open positions on a job board. Simply taking a proactive step together can make you both feel more in control of your future.

What About Communicating With Your Kids?

They are going to know something is up with their parents; whatever they imagine is likely to be worse than the reality. It’s best to be honest about being laid off.  If they want to know what this means for the family, the best answer you can give might be “I don’t know yet. But being laid off happens to lots of people and things usually turn out OK.” 

Older kids are likely to be able to understand what job loss means financially, so you can also include them in discussions about how to keep the bills under control. There are plenty of online resources for helping you trim your budget during the holidays. Your web savvy kids can be a big help in researching these sites for ideas. When they feel like they are helping, they are less likely to act out and add to your stress level.

Be Smart about Holiday Expenditures

Depending on the timing of the lay off notice, you may not be able to retract gifts already purchased. Now of course is the time to be smart about balancing making it through the holidays and planning for the New Year.  Most families go through a belt tightening phase at some point and your kids will survive this just fine. As difficult as a holiday season lay off can be, the most important thing is to be confident in your ability to start a successful job search, see the situation as temporary, and focus your energy on spending time with your family.

The Safe and Secure Retirement Plan Alternative for Business Owners

The Safe and Secure Retirement Plan Alternative for Business Owners

Guest post by Pamela Yellen,
Author of Bank on Yourself: The Life-Changing Secret to Protecting Your Financial Future

The idea of having a comfortable, worry-free retirement has become a distant dream for many business owners -- even for those who did "all the right things" that Wall Street and the financial gurus told them to do. 

Are you tired of relying on hope and luck to achieve your financial goals? If so, how likely do you think it is that following the same strategy that got you where you are today will get you where you want to be?

Give Your Retirement Plan the "Acid Test"

Do you know what your retirement account will be worth in 10, 20, or 30 years… or on the day you plan to tap into it?

If your answer is "no" or "I'm HOPING it will be worth $X" -- you don't have a plan!

And if you're relying on a financial advisor, stock broker or plan administrator for advice, ask them if they can tell you what your account will be worth on the day you plan to retire. Then follow it up with, "And will you give me a money-back guarantee if you don't hit that savings target?"

The Power of Rationalization…

Remember the scene from the 1983 movie classic, "The Big Chill," where the character played by Jeff Goldblum asks, "Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?"

Well, many business owners and professionals today are trying to rationalize away the fact that they won't be able to retire when and how they had planned by trying to convince themselves that retirement is overrated.

They now talk about continuing to work in some capacity as long as they can.

While there's no question that this can give you more of a sense of purpose and fulfillment and keep you from dying of boredom, the reality is that many people are being forced to retire earlier than they can afford to. Job layoffs and health issues are the primary reasons for this. 

I love what I do, and I hope to be doing it for a long time. But shouldn't the decision to retire -- or not -- be a matter of choice, not necessity?

If you believe it should be a matter of choice, what's the best way to invest your money?

I've researched over 450 savings and investing products and strategies over the past two decades, as a consultant to financial advisors. I ultimately concluded that Americans have been brainwashed into believing we must risk our money in order to grow it.

Wall Street and the financial planning industry have led us to believe that "saving" and "investing" are the same thing. However, they are not. The money you have in "savings" is money you don't want (or can't afford) to lose. Money you "invest" is subject to loss. 

Most people today "invest to save," and as a result, have no idea what their nest egg will be worth when they hope or plan to tap into it.

Look Beyond the Traditional Financial and Retirement Planning Strategies

Consider proven and time-tested ways to grow a substantial nest egg -- without the risk or volatility of stocks, mutual funds, real estate, and other investments.

Tip:  For example, there is an asset class that has increased in value during every stock market decline and every period of economic boom and bust for more than a century.

That asset is dividend-paying whole life insurance.

A dividend-paying whole life policy grows by a guaranteed and pre-set amount every year.  In addition, the growth is exponential, meaning it gets better (more efficient) every single year you have the policy, simply because you stick with it.

This gives you some protection against inflation and provides peak growth at the time you need it most (retirement). And no luck, skill, or guesswork is required to make that happen.

Furthermore, there are little-known options that can be added to the policy which turbo-charge the growth of your equity ("cash value") in the policy. When your policy is structured properly, you can use it as a powerful financial management tool from day one.

Once credited to your policy, both your guaranteed annual increase, plus any dividends you may receive, are locked in. They don't vanish due to a market correction.

These policies also give you peace of mind for retirement planning, because you'll know the minimum guaranteed income you can take in retirement, and for how long you can take it. 

Bank On Yourself

You control the money in your policy, not the government.  You can use the money to "bank on yourself" and become your own source of financing, so you can reduce or even eliminate the control banks and financial institutions have over you.

In fact, many business owners and professionals who use the Bank On Yourself method have been able to get access to needed capital to start or grow their businesses – even when no banker would give them a dime – by answering just one question: How much do you want?

Many famous companies used the Bank On Yourself method for start-up capital, including Walt Disney, J. C. Penney, the Pampered Chef and Foster Farms.

No begging, no prying applications to fill out, no pledging your first born.  And you can pay the money back on your own schedule, not someone else's. Plus, you recapture the interest you would otherwise pay to banks and finance institutions to lease or finance equipment, office buildings, and more.

Some insurance companies even offer an option that allows you to use your equity in the policy, and the policy continues growing as though you never touched a dime of it!

In addition, it's possible to take retirement income from these policies with little or no tax consequences, under current tax law.

During the financial crisis, even as the experts lamented there was no place to hide, no one lost a penny in a dividend-paying whole life policy, and their policies continue to grow safely and predictably.

There are many myths about this powerful financial tool, and no shortage of financial gurus who will tell you to avoid whole life policies.  That's why I created the $100,000 Challenge.  It lets you test your knowledge of the facts about dividend-paying whole life.  And a $100,000 cash reward awaits the first person who has a different product or strategy that can match or beat a properly structured dividend-paying whole life policy.

© 2010 Pamela Yellen, author of Bank on Yourself: The Life-Changing Secret to Protecting Your Financial Future

Author Bio
Financial security expert, Pamela Yellen, is author of the best-selling book, Bank On Yourself: The Life-Changing Secret to Growing and Protecting Your Financial Future. For more information, visit: www.BankOnYourself.com and to take the $100,000 Challenge, visit: www.BankOnYourself.com/challenge.

The Number Two Mistake in Online Presentations

Guest post by Roger Courville of 1080 Group

I recently has the pleasure to meet Roger at a seminar he conducted for the Southbay Organization Development Network. Roger is a guru when it comes to conducting effective online webinars and shared some of his tips. Needless to say with a growing virtual workforce, the ability to deliver online presentations, with the same engagement and connection as being live, is a mandatory 21^st century competency.  Here’s more from Roger:

Imagine for a moment that you were sitting down over coffee with a potential partner, and after some get-to-know-you chit chat you say, “so, tell me about your firm?”

On that prompt, your coffee partner pulls out a data sheet and starts reading it to you.

“What?!!?,” you start thinking.  But it continues. 

A half-hour later, when your heart is about as cold as your coffee, he looks up and says, “So, any questions?”

While a bit dramatic, this is essentially what happens every day in online presentations.  Web seminars.  Webinars.

In a study I conducted last year about online presentation best practices, in one section of the survey I presented respondents with a question asking them what annoys them most about online presentations with seven potential responses.

Their top two responses made it look like the other five weren’t even on the list:

“Presenter reads what is one the slides” and “Presenter reads a script.”

So why is this the number two mistake in online presentations?

I’ve incorporated this research into my public and private webinar skills training.  In a recent session to a European audience Alice (her real name) submitted a comment noting, “But I present to audiences for whom English is a second language and they like it when I read the slides to them.  It helps their comprehension.”

My response,  “Good job, Alice!  You’re obviously not making mistake number one – know thy audience.”

An old adage on the sales floor is “people by from people.”  But that isn’t just a sales tactic.  People aren’t going to pay attention, engage, or trust your ideas if you speak at them.

And their message for webinar presenters is clear:

TALK with me.  Talk WITH me.  Talk with ME.

About Roger
Roger is the co-founder of 1080 group. Roger and Scott Driscoll met at the company that literally invented web meeting professional services, Envoyglobal.com. Envoyglobal.com later merged with PlaceWare Web Conferencing, becoming PlaceWare's "Event Services Division," and their business model for providing professional event services was copied industry-wide.

In 2003, PlaceWare was acquired by Microsoft for $200 million, and that same "ESD" group lives on providing services as the services division of Microsoft Office Live Meeting. After Microsoft, Scott and Roger were part of the founding team of Corvent, a web conferencing services company providing professional services and proprietary technologies for the web seminar industry.

Scott and Roger formed 1080 Group to serve companies who have chosen to produce their own marketing and training web seminars.

For more information visit www.1080group.com

On Twitter at www.twitter.com/1080group

Pick up their book, The Virtual Presenters Handbook

HeartMath – Improving Well Being & Work Productivity

By Tony Deblauwe

The ability to reduce stress in the workplace has many benefits. Employees that learn how to reduce or eliminate stress inducing reactions on the job are more productive which means lower healthcare costs to employers.

I attended a seminar hosted by the South Bay Organizational Development group (www.sobodn.com) discussing a method to measure stress reactions developed by HeartMath. The seminar presenter was Catherine Calarco, Sr. VP of Sales & Marketing for HearthMath who produce the EmWave device associated with their stress reduction programs and software.

Among the many interesting stats discussed was the topic of the heart-brain connection. In particular recent research that shows the heart does indeed have a nervous system. This helps explain our sometimes irrational response to something based on an emotional trigger that we reacted to at some point in the past. The heart “memory” communicates to this brain and a reaction occurs even if we understand logically that our response is not ideal.

Participants in the program see many benefits and that translates to lower medical costs for employers (including pharmacy costs). In fact one estimate provided was a savings of over $500 per person per year. By training to be calm in the face of difficult situations, you’re not only calm, but in more control of yourself which is a win for many workplace scenarios.

 

For more information visit:

www.heartmath.com

www.emwave.com