*
Highly Recommended *
He'd
Have Called Them Crazy - Or Worse!
With
the Internet, it's now possible to spend no more than a few
dollars, write a couple of very basic ads, and have instant
access to millions of potential customers all in a matter of
minutes.
If
anyone had told Jim Sheridan he could bank thousands in just
24 hours... without any product of his own... without spending
a penny on getting it or promoting it, he'd have justifiably
said they were nuts.
But
Jim made a decision that he would overcome his skeptical nature
and give it a go. Boy, is he glad he did! That one deal alone
banked him $187,296 in one day.
The
great news is - you can copy Jim's plan exactly. The program
is called Instant Internet Income and I guarantee it does exactly
what it says it does.
Take
a look at how Jim brought in over $175,000
in a single day!
-
Patrick Coffey
"Don't
simply retire from something; have something to retire
to."
Harry
Emerson Fosdick
What's
Your Number?
By
Michael Masterson
How
much money do you need to retire? To quit working and be financially
secure for the rest of your life? Have you thought about that?
Lee
Eisenberg has. In fact, he's written a book about it.
Eisenberg
is a former editor of Esquire magazine. In his mid-fifties,
he admits, he found himself asking this question. And, being
a guy who makes a living thinking and writing about things,
he decided to turn his inquiry into a book.
The
book is titled The
Number, and the number refers to the answer
to that question: How much money do you need before you can
shove the job and kick back?
The
book is a smart, sometimes smart-alecky, discussion of America's
"debt-warp" culture and our preference for spending
over saving. And because we are in debt, Eisenberg argues, most
of us will never be able to afford to retire ... even though
we desperately want to.
As
we get older, Eisenberg says, we begin to think more and more
about The Number. We wonder what The Number is and how we can
attain it. Our infatuation with The Number, Eisenberg suggests,
is symptomatic of America's spiritual shallowness. He makes
fun of financial planners and pundits who provide easy formulas
for figuring The Number. But then he spends the final chapter
doing just that.
Eisenberg's
complaint is that online calculators and magazine worksheets
are deeply flawed because they are "deaf and dumb"
when it comes to what it takes to "lift your spirits and
make your heart sing through old age."
A
financial plan without "a meaning plan," Eisenberg
says, "leads straight to the thudding revelation that
- duh - all the money in the world doesn't buy happiness."
Eisenberg
finds his "meaning plan" in "life-planning guru" George
Kinder.
Kinder
believes you have to "probe deeply into the soul and/or
retain an empathetic advisor to help you explore your psyche
before you can aspire to a custom-made financial plan."
But
apart from the New Age rhetoric, Kinder's ideas on picking
your Number look pretty standard. The Eisenberg/Kinder system
is as follows:
1. Total
up your invested assets (stocks and bonds, cash, etc.) and
multiply by .04. This, Eisenberg says, tells you how much
annual investment income you can expect to withdraw each
year without worrying about running out of money before you
die. (That is a low number - maybe very low. But it's a number
that many financial planners are using today.).
2. Add
in the annual value of any home equity you have and divide
your total equity by the number of years you expect to live.
If you are 50 and have $600,000 in home equity and expect
to live to 80, the annual value of your real estate would
be $20,000.
3. Add
any income you expect from inheritances. (Again, total inheritance
divided by the number of years you expect to live.)
4. Add
the amount of Social Security you expect to get per year.
(You can figure this out by clicking
here.)
5. Add
any expected annual pension payments.
6. Add
any income you expect to earn from royalties, fees, part-time
work, etc.
What
struck me about this formula is that it doesn't give you The
Number at all. Rather, it tells you what your yearly retirement
income is likely to be (expressed, for simplicity sake, in
today's dollars) based on your current net worth.
That's
an interesting calculation. And it is something you should
do, if you haven't done it already. But chances are, when you
get through with the calculation, you won't be happy with The
Number you will get.
In
other words, the total yearly income you could get from your
stock and bond funds, IRAs, pension payments, Social Security
payments, etc. will probably not support the kind of lifestyle
you are hoping to enjoy.
And
since you can't change the income you'll get from Social Security
or your pension plan (if you have one), you are back to asking
the question that Eisenberg began his book with: If my current
invested assets aren't enough to retire on, what is The Number
that is?
Financial
planners have all sorts of clever and sometimes complicated
ways of figuring this out. And most include what Eisenberg
calls the "satisfaction factor," which he describes
as the percent of your current yearly expenses that you need
to live a happy life.
Eisenberg
says that most people make the mistake of thinking that happiness
is more expensive than it really is. He imagines a healthy
retirement lifestyle as one where "you meditate every
morning, then devote a few hours to writing the great American
novel, and the rest of the day to doing volunteer work in the
community."
"This
life, or some variation of it," he says, "will generally
require significantly less money than what you spend now, not
to mention the fact that you won't have commuting-to-work costs;
you'll need to buy fewer spiffy suits and dressy shoes; and
you probably won't have to shell out on things like maintaining
a boat or on mortgages you'll have either paid off or gotten
rid of by jettisoning excess real estate that isn't integral
to the dream."
He
asks: What is a reasonable satisfaction number? Eighty percent?
Seventy percent? Sixty percent?
"You
make the call," are his final words.
Just
like a magazine editor. Leads you to the ultimate question
and then tells you to answer it yourself.
I'll
give you my quick and dirty formula on Friday ... and I'll
see if I can be more definite than Eisenberg was.
Men:
Testosterone Is Not Your Enemy
By
Jon Herring
For
decades, many doctors believed that testosterone hardened arteries
and increased a man's risk of heart disease. New research has
shown just the opposite.
A
Finnish study published in the Journal of the American
College of Cardiology found that healthy testosterone
levels protect against atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries).
The research also revealed that men with low testosterone had
high plaque buildup in the carotid artery - a precursor to
heart disease and heart attack.
You
can boost testosterone naturally, without shots, pills, or
supplements. Here are three ways to do it:
1. Expose
yourself to sunlight for 10 minutes to a half-hour each day.
2. Do
resistance exercises (with bodyweight or weights) on a regular
basis.
3. Eat
foods known to support testosterone production, including
eggs, oysters, lean beef, wild fish, nuts, and garlic.
* Highly
Recommended *
You
Can Get All The Money You Want From People, Not Banks....And
Get It Faster, Easier And There's No Limit To How Much You
Can Borrow.
Getting
money to
do real estate deals needn't have anything to do with going
to a bank, filling out an application, putting up down payments
or waiting to be approved. Assertive investors don't need
to go near banks that want to control their lives and tell
them what they can or can't qualify to borrow.
Learn
how to get all the money you want now.
-
Kam Weiler
The
"Speaker Friendly" Room
By
Peter J. Fogel
More
than 28 years of stand-up comedy and speaking experience has
proven to me that to get sitting-on-the-edge-of-their-seats
attention from your audience, you absolutely must establish
intimacy with them.
It's
your speech, your career ... and it could be your company's
bottom line at stake here. If they snooze, you lose.
The
closer you are to your listeners, the more connected they'll
be to you and your message. So it's best if you're in a room
where the stage is placed as close to the audience as humanly
possible. But even if you're speaking in a large airplane hangar
of a room, you can still create the sense of intimacy that's
so necessary to make a connection. Here's how:
1. Slow
your delivery down so that everyone present hears your pearls
of wisdom. You don't want folks having to play catch-up by
whispering to each other, "What'd he say?"
2. If
you're in a 900-seat theater and only 75 people show up,
entice them into the front rows.
3. To
make an even greater impact, leave the stage entirely and
stand on the floor right in front of them. (This works especially
well when your audience is smaller than expected.)
Follow
these three steps, and I guarantee you'll connect immediately
with your listeners. (How your speech goes after that is up
to you.)
[Ed.
Note: Peter J. Fogel is a copywriter/speaker/humorist and the
creator of Peter "The
Humorator" Fogel's Guide to Effective Public Speaking,
an e-book/DVD/audio program.]
Worth
Quoting: "All men are NOT born equal."
From
a letter written to Bill Bonner at The
Daily Reckoning...
"I'd
like to share a grammar school lesson I got in the fifth or
sixth grade of Catholic elementary school. Bear in mind that
this was the fifties, and the boys were taught by the Christian
Brothers. These guys were tough. Many of them, if not all,
were WWII or Korean War vets. And, they had answers for most
tough questions. They also were pretty blunt. And, not a lot
of patience for distinctions that did not make a difference.
Strangely, they took a pretty strong position on [the subject
of equality].
"Jefferson
wrote 'all men are created equal.' To these battle-hardened
vets, there was nothing 'wrong' about this assertion. Quizzically,
they would say, 'All men ARE created equal. But, all men are
NOT born equal.'
"They
made a BIG deal out of that. You had to approach every person
with an open mind. With justice for the SOBs (Swell Old Boys)!
With charity for all the people who weren't born with the advantages
we had. Report cards had things like 'respects the rights of
others,' 'works well with others,' and my personal favorite:
'helps others reach their potential.'
"There
were a lot of funny lessons all designed to help us learn what
they were trying to teach. There was one activity that had
envelopes with rewards and punishments in them at random -
with random rewards and punishments written on the outside.
Lesson: Don't judge a book by its cover. Tests where all the
students' grades were equal to the lowest grade in the class.
Lesson: teamwork. Classes were split into sections - smart,
average, stupid, and dumb - with tests graded on improvement.
Lesson: Just cause you're smart doesn't guarantee you'll win.
Halfway through a test, the rules were changed, no sympathy.
Lesson: Life throws curves.
"And
we had to adapt, live with it, and grow up.
"So,
there is a theoretical 'created,' like the theory of poker.
And then there is the 'born,' like playing the hand you're
dealt.
"Hope
this ramble makes some sense, and explains what I think Jefferson
was trying to say. Seems obvious to me, but then I was taught
by some Marines about life."
* Highly
Recommended *
Get
People To Send You Their Money!
Like
it or not, money is important in our society. You need to take
wealth seriously for your spouse and your children. When you
set up a profit generating program and make it a part of your
life everything else will improve...
You
owe it to yourself to look into this opportunity.
-
Will Bonner
Word
to the Wise: Quondam
"Quondam"
(KWAHN-dum) - from the Latin for "when" - is a fancy
way of saying "former."
Example
(as used by David Freeman in One
of Us): "There was an exception to this
in the form of Mrs Edna Parsons, a formidable Englishwoman
who had once been the Prince's nanny and now served as proctor,
supervising his behaviour. She was about fifty and true to
her quondam profession, she could be quite strict."
