Issue #2437

• WEALTHY: Blame it on the banks (Charles Delvalle)
• HEALTHY: The Rodney Dangerfield of bone-health vitamins (Dr. Jonny Bowden)
• WISE: Carl Sandburg on the value of time

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

• How much is it worth to you to cut your own lawn? (Michael Masterson)
• Does your advertising work – or is something skewing the results? (Suzanne Richardson)
• It’s Fun to Know… about the relationship between height and success (Judith Strauss)
• Add "quiddity" to your vocabulary

== Highly Recommended ==

The Truly Wealthy “Fish” in a Different “Lake”

These days, it seems everyone is out to make a quick buck. But they are all fishing in the same pond, so to speak.  The real money is in a nearby lake… actually, more like an ocean of profits that almost no one knows about.

Take a walk with me and let me show how you can follow a few simple steps and lure more profits to you on a consistent basis than anything I’ve ever seen.  

You’ve heard the old saying, “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day… Teach him how to fish, feed him for a lifetime.” Well, friend, this is that lifetime of profits available to you.  Up to you how long you want to “fish” there.  Personally, I’ll be there a long while… If you want to join me, click here… and learn how fast you can start making money.

Dear ETR: How does a weak dollar affect housing and stock prices?

"I can understand the prices of oil, precious metals, food, etc. going up when the dollar is devalued – but how does that reconcile with housing and stock prices going down?"

Jules F.

Hi, Jules –

A devalued dollar doesn’t really have a strong relationship with the housing or stock markets. Granted, a weaker dollar should make any American assets more attractive to foreigners. But there isn’t a huge, parallel relationship such as the one the dollar shares with oil.

So why are our stock and housing markets crashing? Because banks issued way too much credit to people who never should’ve gotten it. Now those loans are being defaulted on, and banks across the nation are losing tens of billions.

Since the big banks are in trouble, they have slowed their lending. And if people can’t borrow money easily, a lot of them won’t buy a house, a car, or even a washing machine. This reduced spending eventually hits the profits of major corporations, and the downturn continues.

In the end, the housing and stock market crash had little to do with a falling dollar and more to do with too much credit. Until that build up finishes unwinding, you’ll continue to see bank stocks drop in value.

One of the best ways to take advantage of their fall is to buy the UltraShort ProShares Financials ETF (SKF). This ETF (exchange-traded fund) goes up 2 percent every time the Dow Jones U.S. Financials Index drops 1 percent.

- Charles Delvalle

[Ed. Note: The dollar may be weak, but the price of oil is still strong. It's possible to make big bucks in the coming years as energy companies search for new sources of oil and gas. You can discover two best-in-class drilling rig companies that will be on the receiving end of this tidal wave of cash. Get the details here.]

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"Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you."

Carl Sandberg

How Much Are You Worth? Figure It Out and Make Your Life Much, Much Richer

By Michael Masterson

A French woman, upon seeing Picasso in a Parisian restaurant, approached the great master and insisted that he put down his coffee and make a quick sketch of her. Graciously, Picasso obliged. When he was done, she took the drawing, put it in her handbag, and then pulled out her billfold.

"How much do I owe you?" she asked.

"$5,000," was Picasso’s reply.

"$5,000? But it took you only three minutes!" she exclaimed.

"No," Picasso answered. "It took me all my life."

That’s how I feel about the work I do. My skills – as a marketer and small-business builder – are very valuable. If you want me to help you sell your products or grow your business, you can expect to pay me at least $2,000 an hour.

And that’s only if I have the time… the work time… left in my schedule. If you want me to work during my personal time – evenings or weekends or during my vacation – how much would it cost you? You don’t want to ask.

An ETR reader – a wealthy businessman who has been reading ETR for years – has been trying to persuade me to help him grow his business. Recently, he offered to pay me $50,000 to spend a weekend with him – plus "plenty more" if I agreed to provide ongoing support.

I graciously turned down his offer, and he had a hard time understanding why. "I’m offering to pay you $3,000 an hour," he said.

That’s true. For 16 hours (two days’ work), $50,000 amounts to just a bit more than $3,000 an hour. But I didn’t want to do it, because he was asking me to give up my personal time – the time I spend with my family and friends and the time I spend on my hobbies. And that time is worth at least twice as much as my working time.

How to Calculate Your Hourly Worth

Now, let’s talk about you. Let’s talk about how to calculate what your time is worth.

Here’s the formula I use: Take the amount of money you earn per year. Then divide that by 50 weeks and then by 40 hours.

For example, my friend Walt has a growing real estate business. To convince him that he shouldn’t be doing so much of the grunt work himself, I helped him apply my formula to his situation.

Walt makes about $150,000 a year. $150,000 divided by 50 weeks equals $3,000 (his weekly income). $3,000 divided by 40 hours comes to $75.

"That’s how much your work time is worth," I told him. "So never do anything yourself that you can have done for less than $75 a hour."

Now you do it. Divide your yearly income by 50 weeks. Then divide that by 40 hours.

If the number you come up with is less than $50, it tells me you are not practicing a financially valuable skill – one that contributes to your company’s bottom line. That means being involved in product creation, marketing, sales, or profit management. If that’s the case, go back and reread past ETR messages on how to get yourself into one of those jobs… because that’s where the big salaries are.

At the same time, make yourself as valuable as you can be at your present job. And start focusing on the really important work that will propel your career – and your income – forward.

Before long, your hourly rate will be double or even triple what it is today.

And your personal time will always be worth even more.

It might be three times as valuable as the time you spend at work… five times as valuable… or 10 times as valuable. Only you will know just how much it’s worth to you. But at the very least, your personal time should be worth double what your work time is.

Once you know what that number is, you can make sure that every personal task you engage in is "worth" that amount of money to you.

Let’s say, for example, that, by applying my formula, you have calculated your work time to be worth $25 per hour. And you figure your personal time is worth twice that: $50 per hour. Let’s also say that you spend three hours every weekend in the summer doing yard work (mowing the lawn, trimming hedges, fertilizing, and so on). Ask yourself if you think it’s worth $150 ($50 times 3 hours of your personal time). If you feel it is, keep doing it. If it’s not, hire someone else to do it – which you can certainly do for a lot less than $150 a week – and free up your time for activities you really enjoy.

Same goes for any household job that you can hire out – cleaning, painting, washing the car.  

We all have the same number of hours in the day. How much you get paid for the hours you work – and how much pleasure you get from the hours you don’t – are both up to you.

[Ed. Note: The best way to jack up your hourly income is by mastering a financially valuable skill. And you can learn the world's most financially valuable skill from a man who was directly responsible for over $2 BILLION in sales. Get the details right here.

And if you want to get the most out of your business and personal time - plus see your net worth soar - starting your own Internet business is the ticket. Learn how you can do it from some of the best business-builders around.]

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== Highly Recommended ==

I Can’t Take It Anymore…

When you are in the know about something – like I am about generating sales online – you can see right through the smoke and mirrors. You clearly see the true money-machine the Internet could be… in the right hands. Now I’m going to show you exactly how to make money online in 3 easy steps. 

Yes, it’s that easy. And some have been hiding the real secret all this time. Check out everything for yourself by clicking here…

ETR Insider Report: How to Deal With Like Lists

By Suzanne Richardson

I don’t have a background in marketing. But it doesn’t matter, because I’m getting what amounts to an MBA here at ETR. Take, for instance, the powerful lesson MaryEllen Tribby gave us in a recent meeting.

We were discussing media buys – the process of buying advertising space in the newsletters or on the Web pages of other companies. MaryEllen has been encouraging us to find more and more new lists of subscribers that we can offer our products to.

One of our marketing associates (who does most of the media buying for ETR) showed us the results of an e-mail ad she’d sent out to one company’s e-mail list. The product she was advertising is a great new one. But hardly anyone bought it.

Was the list a dud? Were the subscribers to that e-mail newsletter just not good buyers?

"You can’t tell from this media buy," MaryEllen said. "Because you tested the wrong product."

How did she know?

"Testing a new list is like testing anything else," MaryEllen told us. "You test only one variable at a time. And a new list is a variable.

"Let’s say you have a cutting-edge financial product. You’ve been advertising that product to lists of subscribers to financial newsletters, and the product is selling really well.

"That product becomes your control. So any time you find a like list – an e-mail newsletter with similar subscribers – the first thing you should market to them is that control product. If you send them your control and no one buys, then you can say with some certainty that you shouldn’t mail to that list again."

Keep this in mind the next time you find a new list to advertise to.

[Ed. Note: MaryEllen Tribby has 20 years in the marketing trenches, so when she speaks, the ETR team listens. You may not be able to sit in on ETR's marketing meetings, but you can still get MaryEllen's advice on marketing and business building. Let MaryEllen - along with a team of ETR experts - show you the shortcuts to building an Internet business from the ground up.]

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Reader Feedback: "Please keep up the good work."

"I immensely enjoyed MaryEllen’s article about "The Right Way to Leave." One needs to know how best to leave a job on a positive note.

"ETR has also been a good resource for wealth-building information as well as health and goal planning. And through ETR, one can find authors who have written some good books. I have enjoyed reading audio books by Brian Tracy, who is an awesome goal planner.

"Please keep up the good work – keeping us motivated, giving us good information, and introducing us to people whose work we can enjoy reading while gaining knowledge."

Lori M.
Maryland

[Ed. Note: What's the best way to get more of the information and advice you want? Let us know what you like! Write to ETR at ReaderFeedback@gmail.com and tell us what's helped you and what you want to see more of.]

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New Discoveries Put One Neglected Vitamin on the Map

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS

Vitamin K is the "Rodney Dangerfield" of bone-health vitamins: It gets no respect. No one talks about it. Instead, we talk about calcium and magnesium and vitamin D. But vitamin K, too, is critically important for building strong bones.

In fact, neither vitamin D nor calcium can produce healthy bone mineralization without adequate supplies of vitamin K. Bone is a complex living structure, comprised of cells, mineral crystals, and thick matrix proteins that hold the entire thing together like glue. Vitamin K actually activates a compound – osteocalcin - that acts like studs inside the walls of a house. It’s a structural framework that helps anchor calcium molecules inside the bone.

Vitamin K helps protect the bones against calcification in the blood vessels, a prime risk factor for a type of heart disease called atherosclerosis. In a well- known study of vitamin K – the Rotterdam Study – subjects with above-average intake of vitamin K had reduced mortality from coronary heart disease. They also had a lower death rate in general. The authors suggested that adequate intake of vitamin K2 could be important in preventing coronary heart disease. And in the Nurses’ Health Study of 72,000 women, those who got the most vitamin K were about one-third less likely to get a hip fracture. The effect of vitamin K in their diet was actually greater than the effect of synthetic estrogen – a double-whammy of protection against both atherosclerosis and osteoporosis.

By keeping calcium in bone where it belongs, vitamin K may help prevent heart disease, stroke, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and more. Considering the importance of this vitamin, it’s reasonable to ask yourself if you’re getting enough.

Researchers now think that vitamin K is needed in larger quantities than what was once thought, particularly in aging adults. Recently, it was shown that foods have less vitamin K than previously thought. Most multi-vitamins don’t contain any vitamin K at all, and the ones that do don’t contain enough for optimal health.

Vitamin K has three forms: K1 is found in foods, K2 is made in the body by intestinal bacteria, and K3 is a synthetic form available by prescription. All seem to work about the same. The best food sources of vitamin K are green leafy vegetables, particularly kale, spinach, collard greens, beet greens, turnip greens, and watercress. Broccoli rabe, Brussels sprouts, Swiss chard, and onions are also good sources, and even an egg provides 25 mcg (almost one-third of what you should be getting daily). If you take it as a supplement, the K2 (menaquinone-7) form appears to be superior to K1.

[Ed. Note: Making simple changes in your lifestyle can help you stay healthy and live longer. For easy-to-implement, all-natural ways to improve your health, pick up Jonny Bowden's book The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth.
For more information, go to www.jonnybowden.com. And read more of his articles on healthy living in ETR's natural health e-letter.]

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It’s Fun to Know: The Relationship Between Height and Success

By Judith Strauss

Study after study has indicated that taller people are more successful in life. But before you use your lower-than-average height as an excuse for not becoming a superstar, consider this…

Napoleon was about 5′2" (or 5′6", depending on which source you trust).

Beethoven and Mozart were both about 5"4".

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is 4′ 10.5".

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m kinda short – assuming you think just shy of 5′1" is short. But in some ways, that’s a plus. As Reich pointed out in a recent New York Times interview: "I use far fewer calories than the average person. I am much more economically and environmentally sustainable. I exhale less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I use up less space. I have a little house."

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== Highly Recommended ==

How to Rig Life in Your Favor Starting This Month

Every industry has trade secrets. Insider tips and tactics for rigging life in your favor, giving you the advantage in almost every situation. 

What’s more, Early to Rise has access to and friendships with many of the world’s recognized experts in just about every imaginable business and personal niche out there.

And crazy enough, I want to give you these insider secrets for FREE.  No kidding.  Call it an ethical bribe, but you won’t let anyone pry your fingers from the information in this FREE book once you take a look at what’s inside.  I guarantee it.  You can take my word or you can check everything out for yourself by clicking here…

Word to the Wise: Quiddity

"Quiddity" (KWID-ih-tee) – from the Latin for "what" – is the essential nature of a thing, the quality that makes it what it is.

Example (as used by Bill Strickland in a New York Times review of Off the Deep End by W. Hodding Carter): "Reading about a subculture like swimming provides an opportunity to appreciate the idiosyncratic details and quiddity of the sport."

[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker ... build your self-confidence and intellect ... increase your attractiveness to others ... just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR's new Words to the Wise CD Library.]

Copyright ETR, LLC, 2008

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 5:10 am and is filed under Daily Issues .