18 Eighteen I.docx
Transcript
Eighteen Wow, congratulations on a great job, you have completed the course and made it to the end of your journey to increase your financial literacy knowledge. I’ve learned an awful lot from researching and putting together this information for you. Hopefully, you’ve learned a lot as well and are...
Eighteen Wow, congratulations on a great job, you have completed the course and made it to the end of your journey to increase your financial literacy knowledge. I’ve learned an awful lot from researching and putting together this information for you. Hopefully, you’ve learned a lot as well and are anxious to get started improving your financial future. ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ goals were to give you HOPE, knowledge, and the confidence to change your life. Through the power of education and ‘HOPE’ this course has provided you with the financial literacy knowledge and life skills tools you need to achieve your financial goals and dreams. The ‘STFF HOPE PROCESS’, which represents ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom – Helping Others Prosper thru Education – Providing Real Options to Create and Empower Savings and Success’ has uplifted and given you the courage, confidence, and visions to overcome your current financial challenges and claim your portion of the tremendous amounts of savings available to you over your lifetime. Now that you have completed the STFF book it’s time to challenge yourself with ‘the STFF Challenge’. You now have the knowledge so you may want to decide to start planning what you want to financially accomplish in your financial journey through life to prepare yourself for retirement. Please use as many of the suggestions, strategies, recommendations, and solutions you’ve read to start to plan how you will have a financially stress-free and productive work-life balance while saving for your retirement. This new financial literacy knowledge has given you a unique opportunity to plan and map out your financial journey’s course to avoid the many financial pitfalls which ruin your ability to accomplish your dreams. The fact is that time waits for no one, before you know it 2-years, 5 years, or 10 years have gone by, and you still find yourself financially struggling like everyone else because you made a few bad financial decisions. So, please start now and be proactive to make the necessary sacrifices to create a brighter financial future for yourself and your family. Once you start modifying your behavior, working the process, making the best financial decisions, and realizing the abundance of savings it will become a very hard habit to break. Whether you are just starting your financial life’s journey, trying to improve your savings, correct your current credit situation, or reentering society you will need this basic financial literacy knowledge to change and improve your lives. This book/course is an investment tool, it’s like a ‘Financial Head Start Program’ to help you build a stronger basic financial foundation for the future. The exposure to these, ‘ Food for Thought’ examples, ideas, recommendations, suggestions, and solutions has given you a plethora of strategic financial life skill tools for managing and succeeding in life. These tools were developed to assist you in your ability to manage your money, credit, and financial challenges for the rest of your lives. Its fundamental purposes are to give you many easy and relatable examples and options to understand, follow and implement to improve your current financial situation. It will also be a reference resource to get you back on course if you wander off or have any financial setbacks. The implementation of many of these strategies and solutions will reward you with the ‘HOPE’ of being able to make positive life changes to increase your purchasing power. It will help you avoid and eliminate poor financial decisions, allowing you to gain a sense of control over your finances. You now have the necessary financial knowledge and life skill tools to best serve you for the rest of your life. This knowledge can and should be shared and taught to your children and or everyone else for generations to come. These new financial literacy life skill tools should be used to inspire ‘HOPE’, motivation, confidence, and courage that’s needed to help you build bridges and clear paths to achieve your goals and dreams. These are the first steps you must take toward your improved financial capabilities & your financial freedom. ‘HOPE’ can redirect a person to focus on making positive changes who once felt like they have no chance to improve their economic status. It can also become that needed driving force and motivation for one’s relentless desire to succeed. ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ helps the reader become aware of and believe that ‘HOPE’ is still alive in them, and it will never die as long as they believe they have the necessary financial tools to achieve a better financial future. You just needed to have read this book, so get on board with the suggested strategies, and make the necessary plans and sacrifices to improve your current situation. The book has offered you a plethora of over six dozen well-explained, illustrated, examples and calculations of recommended strategic suggestions. These solutions are at no cost to you, but you can very easily implement them into your daily lives. All they require are some behavior modifications, commitments, and discipline to make changes on your part. As your ‘Personal Brand’, it is your responsibility to be a proactive advocator to uplift yourself and change your future. The process is doable and quite easy when you express the desire and drive to make a commitment and incorporate many of these recommended solutions into your lives. These solutions can provide you with many ways to manage and redistribute your income to substantially increase your purchasing power. It repeatedly stresses the importance of managing your credit in order to finance the many large purchases you have to make at the best available interest rates. This will allow you to save for retirement while building financial security and inevitably increasing your net worth. It will give you a wealth of knowledge, and the skills to ensure that you achieve financial security and change and improve your social and economic status. In the past, you may have learned or become aware of many of these planning strategies only as ‘hind sights’ lessons from the infamous ‘School of Hard Knocks’, well after you have made many financial mistakes. The book prepares and helps you navigate through and avoid these mistakes with several road maps to success. This information will allow you to be proactive, anticipate and become more responsible and accountable in ensuring your own financial success. It will assist you in better understanding your part in getting yourself on the right path to eliminate financial insecurities and inequities of wealth. ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’s’ purpose is to provide you with as much of the knowledge, foresight, and strategic planning skills you’ll need to reach your ‘Pot of Gold at The End of the Rainbow’. That’s the lottery winnings mentioned in the Introduction. This gives you many, many more options to improve your current financial situation and all the knowledge to make it happen. Hopefully, you learned at least two valuable key lessons which are (1) a better understanding of the importance of your credit score, to treasure and value it, because an excellent credit score is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. (2) That ‘it’s better to have this knowledge in a lifetime and not need to use it than to need this knowledge during your lifetime and not be aware that this valuable information exists at all’. All the solutions referenced and explained throughout the book help you understand the importance of having knowledge of money, credit, and finance management and how it will benefit you. It also gives you the life skill tools to increase your money’s purchasing power, and savings and shows you the actual positive rewards of your behavior changes. Remember, these solutions need your commitment to planning, budgeting, sacrifice, and discipline to remain focused and promise to stick to the processes. Managing your credit will require that you ‘live within your financial means’ no matter how much money you earn it requires planning, budgeting, and sacrificing. It also requires an awareness of where and what you spend all your money on and the financial planning of all your purchases. Please consider the use of some type of cash ledger book for written documentation of your monthly overhead expenses and other expenditures. This will provide you with one handy central location for all your monthly financial expense information when you need to make budgeting adjustments. You don’t have to implement all the recommended suggested solutions, for starters just pick those you need, and feel are the best ones to help you manage your income. You can add more recommendations as you begin to reap the benefits from the first group selected. However, simply managing your credit score would be the most beneficial to you over your lifetime. If you are able to accomplish this one goal, it is more than likely you are budgeting and managing your income as well as ‘living within your means’. You will soon begin to realize that all the recommendations work together like a well-oiled machine. Even if you are a professional athlete, entertainer, or entrepreneur you cannot spend money like it’s endless and will never run out. Your monthly overhead budget expenses must be planned around your net take-home income and based on your career’s longevity and savings. Many of these high-earning professionals may have very short careers, more so athletes. They should save a larger percentage of their incomes to maintain the higher lifestyle they have become accustomed to as they transition into life after sports with much less income. They’ll need adequate insurance to cover, protect and replace any loss of income due to injury, illness or accidents and income annuities for long term income. Please don’t dismiss how vitally important your credit score is in your financial success. By maintaining an ‘excellent’ credit score you are giving yourself the ‘Keys’ to the lowest interest rates forever. This simple strategy alone will repay you over and over again every time you finance anything. This will increase purchasing power by saving you tens of thousands of dollars if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in lower interest payments over your lifetime. Another strategy like using the supermarket as your ‘stock market’ is being flexible to purchase and prepare those products for sale. Perhaps investing in a freezer and a washing machine and a dryer are just a few simple examples of how you can save money. All these successful solutions only require an honest understanding of your needs versus your ‘wants’. Coupled with your ability to plan, sacrifice, and commit to better managing and investing your finances is a win, win situation for you as you strive to achieve financial freedom. All the money you are able to save from using many of the suggested strategies and solutions will come in very handy during times of inflation. When the prices for everything seem to be going through the roof, especially food and gas. Whether it’s due to a computer chip shortage, delays in the shipping distribution chain, natural disasters, or the price of crude oil you’ll be in a much better position with all your savings available to you. These price increases won’t cause you the same added hardships that they will for those who didn’t have the opportunity to read this book to increase their financial literacy knowledge. They weren’t able to increase their savings and purchasing power and build bridges to improve their future financial security. As a matter of fact, these hard times will create challenges for them to pay their bills on time causing their credit score to suffer and drop drastically. While reading the ‘Book’ you probably didn’t keep track of the over six dozen suggested strategies to increase your purchasing power and create wealth when these solutions are implemented. Later in this chapter, there is a summary of the total potential savings mentioned throughout the chapters. It will show you there are mega-bucks amounts of money you could be walking away from in your life because you choose not to use the many suggested solutions offered to you. Therefore, you don’t have the additional financial literacy knowledge to change your ways and you continue to mismanage your income and your credit score. ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ offers clear paths and road maps to avoid many financial mistakes most people make who had to learn from the ‘School of Hard-Knocks’. Unfortunately, that will continue for most of you and could have been avoided by educating yourself with this available increased financial literacy knowledge and applying it to your daily financial decisions. The examples and illustrations walk you through and show you easy alternatives to best manage your finances and achieve your financial dreams. You may choose to follow all the suggested routes provided for you or you can pick and choose the solutions you want to follow. Whichever routes you take you will be guaranteed to have a ‘heck of a lot' less financial stress in your life. Hopefully, at some point, you’ll realize that every solution presented has positive cash savings benefits. If your goals and objectives are to enjoy; the fruits of your labor, save money, purchase a vehicle, own a house, retire comfortably, and have financial security, then ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ can definitely help you reach your goals to achieve your ‘American Dreams’. There’s are an abundance of positive collateral benefits in increasing your financial literacy such as creating a more productive, focused driven society, especially as you pass this financial knowledge on to your children. The key takeaways provided are to live within your means, which helps you keep a very good to excellent credit rating. It also requires planning, budgeting, sacrificing, and behavior modifications like patience, commitment, discipline, and flexibility to succeed. It may sound like a lot of changes, but they are all interrelated and work together. None of these changes cost you any money, not one penny, but you must have the willingness and discipline to make the changes. This is a no-cost investment in yourself, your future and the financial rewards are enormous. By incorporating many of these common-sense strategies into your personal and financial lives you could avoid many financial pitfalls and setbacks. Of course, you may not see the benefit initially, but you will begin to see all the money that you have been spending on things you now view as totally unnecessary and wasteful. Just knowing where your income is being spent gives you the knowledge and the flexibility to make the necessary adjustments to become wiser, more frugal, and more efficient with your nonessential purchases going forward. As you increase your use of planning and researching, you will enhance these skills. It allows you to make only the purchases that have been confirmed that you can afford before making purchases. You now see the benefits of making only those purchases you need and can afford to help keep your credit score profile in excellent standing. The more intelligently you make your purchases the more purchasing power you will realize. This newly acquired knowledge now allows you to plan for savings and keeps your credit score as close to excellent as possible. Let’s try to summarize how many of the strategies presented increased the available dollars you had the opportunity to save and generated an increase in your overall purchasing power. The main goals of this process were to enlighten and provide you with options and ‘Food for Thought’ ideas to consider as the best alternative ways to best manage your income. These strategic solutions are designed to better prepare and help you determine the true cost of many of the financed purchases you will have to make in the future and keep from repeating any of your bad decisions from the past. It will require your willingness and commitment to sacrifice and forego spending your money on the items you ‘want’ or think you need today for what you will really need in the future. This smart simple change will be your ticket to future financial security and independence. Let’s review how much maintaining a very good to excellent credit rating could benefit you over your lifetime. The chart below is a recap of how your savings are rewarded by following some of the plethora of strategies recommended throughout the book. It provides you with a minimum estimated total of the huge amounts of money you could ‘earn’ without any money invested. That’s right, absolutely no money out of your pocket invested, but a huge return on your simple behavior changes. All it takes is your willingness to commit to acquiring the necessary financial literacy knowledge, skills, and ability to implement these solutions into your daily financial activities. Here’s a summary of how large your financial savings can be from implementing less than twenty of the six dozen-plus suggested strategies could be. This is real money you can put back into your pockets over your lifetime. Your Lottery Winnings Over 30 Years For Keeping A Very Good Credit Score Number in Household 1 2 Home Breakfast/ Lunch Mthly Save 1-$636 2-$860 228,900 309600 Employer Matched 401K 500000 1000000 House Purchase over 30-yr Mortgage Interest Savings 165000 165000 Lower Property Taxes 45-yr 264000 264000 House Purchase vs, Renter 30 years 167855 167855 House Appreciation over 30 years 160000 160000 Supermarket Ind $1800 Couple $2400 54000 72000 Best value Food Items 10800 15600 Freezer Purchase 27000 42000 Washer-Dryer/Laundromat 9400 12000 Lowest Interest Rate Savings On Major Household Purchase 36000 36000 5 Cars in 30 yrs. @ 0% vs 8% Interest 39360 70360 Couples $1,500 mo. Rent Savings over 45 yrs. 0 810000 Your Total Lottery Winnings 1662316 3124417 These numbers also represent an estimate of the minimum of how much money you may be leaving behind on the table. It’s the money you have turned your back on and forgot to collect because you didn’t take the initiative or have the discipline to increase your financial literacy knowledge for managing your money, credit, and finances. If you learn nothing else just know where your money goes. Where are all your lottery winnings going, to convenience purchases or to those higher interest payments because of a poor credit score and poor financial decisions? If you are really committed to ‘Process’, your actual savings could be even higher. These estimated reward numbers for a single person equal about $1.5 million and for a couple is close to $4 million over 30 years. The calculated savings amount for a couple in one household is over 45 years. Not too shabby, is it? Following the course process outlined in this book will put and keep you on track to create your own personal wealth. Your saving amounts will vary based on the number of the suggested solutions you incorporate in your life, how high you’re able to maintain and keep your credit score, and how many times you finance large purchases. The more you follow the processes outlined in ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’, the more wealth you will accumulate throughout your life. These savings numbers can also be viewed as how much you can increase your overall purchasing power during your lifetime by implementing many of the over sixty suggested strategy solutions in the book. It’s quite a bit of money, isn’t it? As you begin to see the financial benefits of the recommendations you’ll start using more and more of the available solutions. They will generate even more savings for you. You can transition these types of organization and management life skill tools to other aspects of your life. Hopefully, you agree this book has provided you with many strategic budgeting options for better managing your finances and solutions you can implement to increase your purchasing power. If so, then you will agree that the purchase or gift of this book can be considered a very good investment. The book’s purpose was to increase your financial literacy knowledge has been accomplished! You don’t have to follow all the strategies and solutions suggested to you. The book isn’t suggesting you deprive yourself of some of the things you want but it is asking you to consider a happy medium of moderation. It just gives you the knowledge and ability to understand what you’re spending your money on. Are your monthly overhead expenses, planning, and budgeting your priority? However, if you like indulging in gourmet coffee, eating out, and living a life of luxury that you can’t really afford, just know how much money these habits are really costing you weekly, monthly, and annually. If you’re okay with the amounts you are spending, then keep on doing what you are doing. This way, when you need to upgrade or purchase a vehicle you know the money is available. Because you’re willing and disciplined to sacrifice giving up some of the things to don’t need but only ‘want’. It all boils down to the choices you make, believe it or not, you do have control over those ‘want’ purchases. Now that you have completed reading ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’, the question is, “do you now have the discipline to make these better purchasing choices ?” Remember these are just suggestions and recommendations as to perhaps how you may want to better manage your money, credit, and finances. And allowing you throughout your life to recover and collect all the money available to you, only because you made good financial decisions. This will provide you with many opportunities to save for times of higher prices and inflation. It will also allow you to accumulate assets, savings, retirement funds, and financial security for life. One of the primary purposes of the book was to create an awareness of what you are spending your income on so you can adjust if you are struggling to make ends meet and not ‘living within your means’. You should want to know if you are eating out and/or smoking enough money for the payments for that new car you need. Or are you spending enough money for a down payment for the house you should be purchasing in the future? Simply having this knowledge and financial skills will empower you to better control your overall finances. There’s a saying ‘Knowledge is Power’, therefore, ‘with this Knowledge you now have the ‘Power’ to make better financial decisions and achieve your ‘American Dreams’. As mentioned earlier and more importantly these number also represents how much more money you could end up spending if you have a poor credit score and with the mismanagement of your income throughout your lifetime. Ask yourself, can you can afford to give away all this money? Without this new financial literacy knowledge, it would be extremely challenging if not impossible for you to obtain this level of future financial security and wealth. This cannot be made any clearer, all these financial rewards start with you earning and keeping that very good to ‘excellent’ credit score rating and having a living wage job. This will allow you to borrow all the money needed to finance your larger purchases at the best available interest rates. Please don’t walk away from this kind of money, it’s yours for the taking. All you have to do is just properly manage your money, and credit and make the right financial decisions. These right decisions give you the power to change your life and improve and secure your financial future.
