18 Eighteen II.docx

Eighteen II Here's a short summary Just knowing what percentage of your income is committed to each of your overhead expenses; housing, utilities, food, auto/transportation including insurance and gas, Internet/Cable TV, cell phones, and savings is critical. The amount of your remaining income shoul...

Eighteen II Here's a short summary Just knowing what percentage of your income is committed to each of your overhead expenses; housing, utilities, food, auto/transportation including insurance and gas, Internet/Cable TV, cell phones, and savings is critical. The amount of your remaining income should also be tracked for items such as eating out, happy hours, beer/spirits/smoking, entertainment, gambling, and clothing. You also have personal care, hair care & salon, manicure & pedicure, cleaners, and maid/housekeeping services. Keeping these records of all your expenditures will give you immediate knowledge and access to where you can cut back and make expense adjustments when needed and quickly. If you don’t have enough money to pay all your monthly overhead expenses you will have a lot of debt, no savings, and poor credit. The reasons may be either you are not making enough money, or you are probably spending too much money and living beyond your means. If you don’t make any of the suggested behavior modifications your current behavior will cost you tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in higher interest finances charges, penalties, and late fees over your lifetime. Nor will you have any financial protection against future federal reserve interest rate increases, inflation, and price increases making matters even worse. On the other hand, if implement some of these strategies, solutions, behavior modifications and live within your means, you will be able to maintain a good to excellent credit score and accumulate savings. This will allow you to purchase a home and have the things you ‘need’. Your savings will be a puffer against rising prices, inflation, and Federal interest rate increases. Your excellent credit score has earned you the lowest available interest rates on all your financial purchases. Homeownership will be easily obtainable which is your foundation for building wealth. This will put tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars back into your pockets and will be on your way to ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’. 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 increased 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 a living wage job. This allows 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. The correct financial decisions will give you the power to change your life and improve and secure your financial future. These rewards are like the lottery tickets you have already won that have been lost and you need to find them. It is like everyone’s personal treasure hunt, your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that has always been there. It’s been planted and hidden in your future even before you started your life’s financial journey, you just need to find it, and collect it. Your financial lives are similar to those side-scrolling platform video games, like the one with the ape or the little plumber guy in the overalls or more recently the candy game on cell phones. Where these players need to find their way through all kinds of obstacles and mazes collecting prizes as they reach higher levels and get more and more bonuses. Throughout the game try to collect the maximum score and prizes to win the game. Just as you need to navigate your way through the complex world of finances by making the right money, credit, and financial decisions. These correct choices give you the ability to collect ‘your lottery money winnings’ throughout your lives until you reach your ‘American Dreams’. Whether it was intentional or not, if you ‘screw up’ and ruin your credit score during your life, it’s like throwing away or losing that winning lottery ticket that’s been hiding in your pocket that has your name written on it. Please empower yourselves to do whatever is necessary to improve your credit score and make the changes in your lives that will allow you to collect your lottery ticket winnings. Your total lottery winnings represent your passage to ’happiness, success, and ‘wealth’ a.k.a. your ‘America Dream’. Your accumulative efforts and willingness to execute these strategies with plans, budgets, goals, and discipline will pay you huge financial dividends well beyond your imagination and expectations. The examples referenced and shown in this book confirm that throughout your lifetime you have many tremendous opportunities to work toward creating personal wealth. All it takes is your belief and desire that you can and do have control of your future with the financial literacy and knowledge available to you. There are no guarantees in life, however, spending the time to input your exact overhead expenses and other expenditures into a ledger will help you stay on course. Reviewing and crunching your numbers periodically may open up your eyes to whole new piles of undiscovered potential money right under your nose. Please do the necessary calculations to understand exactly how interest rates impact on your purchases to make the best decisions based on actual numbers. Once you understand how the credit system works, all those huge interest-rate savings are all yours, just for the taking. If you miss the opportunity to keep an excellent credit score to lower your interest payments to save money, you will be like many people who spend their entire lives fighting to manage their limited incomes to make ends meet, living paycheck to paycheck. Many of them never realize their real dreams or get on the correct path to financial success before it’s too late. Throughout the book course, there were many money-saving opportunities, and strategic solutions uncovered and presented that can help save you tens of thousands of dollars if not hundreds of thousands over your financial life. These savings are available to you with very little effort other than a commitment to plan, budget, and make the right changes to maintain a very good credit score. Many of you may have become somewhat annoyed and disappointed to find out how much money you have actually wasted, because of your current behaviors and lifestyles over the years. Don’t be so hard on yourselves. You were not aware of these useful financial strategies before, but you are now. So, make it happen. Not to worry, that’s the past and you can’t do anything about that. “It’s water over the dam” or as some people say, “the horse is already out of the barn”. However, now that you have read ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ you are equipped with financial knowledge, skills, and power to make better financial choices as to how and what you spend your income on, and you don’t have any more excuses. You are now prepared to start on the right path toward financial freedom leaving your financially challenged past behind. Just to make you feel a little better if you purchased this book or someone gave it to you, for every $100,000 you are able to save in higher interest payments, maintaining a very good credit score represents about a 1,000% return on the investment of the book. So, if you are willing to start participating in most of the recommended strategies suggested, especially managing your credit score, planning, and budgeting, this book purchase can provide you with a huge return on your investment. You are looking at up to 15,000% ROI for singles and up to 40,000% ROI for couples, over your lifetime. That’s not too shabby, huh? It’s your money and you should make use of it because you’ve earned it. Remember that ‘Money Tree’ mentioned back in the Introduction chapter that didn’t really exist? Well, that ‘Money Tree’ really does exist if you believe it can happen. It’s like taking a $1 seed at the age of 20, caring for and neutering it over 45 years until it grows into this huge $150,000 ‘Money Tree’ in time for retirement. The beauty is you had opportunities to pick from your ‘Money Tree’ all of your adult life, simply because you maintained very good credit. Only things like Unicorns aren’t real, but your ‘Money Tree’ can be real if you are disciplined enough to plant and grow your very own Tree. You just need to plan to make the best-informed financial decisions with your newly acquired financial knowledge. It may probably take some of you a short period of time to incorporate and implement some of the money-saving solutions into your daily lives. Be patient, the more you commit to changing your current situation the easier it will become for you. Others can see the huge opportunities ahead and will make the changes immediately. Now that you have become aware of the great opportunities to generate, save money, and build personal wealth, let’s get started immediately. This book has given you the financial skills and tools necessary and a very rare opportunity to implement many strategies to help build bridges and clear paths to become financially successful. Remember only you alone have the power to change your own financial future. These solutions will help you obtain happiness and financial security and access your share of the available wealth to you. Since you work hard, are productive, and desire to receive annual performance raises from your employers to provide additional income for more financial security. Perhaps, since reading this book you now realized you have the power to give yourself huge raises, just by using these better money, credit, and finance management recommendations. If you implement the strategies illustrated in this book you be will able to achieve your ‘American Dreams’ much sooner than expected and become an independent financially responsible member of society. Perhaps, you can also use a portion of these saved funds as ‘seed capital’ money to possibly fulfill a lifelong dream of starting your own business and becoming an entrepreneur. Again, this can be your opportunity to position yourself to improve your current living situation, economic status, and future financial security. So, please don’t leave any of your lottery winnings or ‘wealth’ behind, only to continue struggling and complaining about you don’t have enough money to make ends meet or do the things you need to do in life. So, you can start now, ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ is your ‘Gift’ to building bridges and clear paths to fulfill your goals and dreams. Go for it, you have absolutely nothing to lose and such an enormous amount to gain. The money is real, it’s yours for the taking but you can’t have it now! You have to earn this money by implementing strategies and solutions to make the necessary behavioral changes and working on your plan to achieve it. Good Luck! Think of these recommendations and solutions for success like a Smorgasbord or your Grandmom’s Thanksgiving Dinner, there is always a plethora of foods and desserts to choose from to eat. There are meats, turkey, baked ham, and roast beef, then there are the starches from the stuffing, cranberries, macaroni and cheese, potato salad, rice, corn, candy yams mashed potatoes, rolls, and bread. Next are those vegetables there’s collard greens, string beans, squash, okra, beets, cornbread, rice pudding, etc. Don’t forget the desserts bread pudding, pumpkin, sweet potato, apple, peach, peach cobbler, lemon meringue pies and coconut, chocolate, red velvet, pineapple upside-down, lemon, pound cakes and eggnog, apple cider and ice cream, etc. You can appreciate how having an abundance of options allows you to fulfill and achieve your goal of eating until you’re full. So just take it all in and enjoy the feast, you cannot go wrong when they are all good. Just like choosing any of these financial solutions will help you increase your savings and improve your life. Hopefully, you feel that ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ has given you the knowledge, ‘HOPE’, and life skill tools to change your life. These many ‘Food for Thought’, creative strategies and solutions will absolutely assist you in managing and budgeting your limited income, credit, and finances. As you pick and choose which of these solutions can be immediately implemented to best achieve your goals. You may have noticed that all these suggested solutions are intertwined and interwoven. They have the same repetitive basic principles for making plans, budgets, commitments, and behavior modifications with the use of similar math calculations to confirm, justify and validate their savings. The calculations throughout the book were done to make you aware of the actual amounts of potential money you may be spending without any accountability and awareness. This book’s unique gift is that it also exposes you to all the huge potential money you may never acquire only because you weren’t even aware that it exists and is available to you until now. When choosing to implement these strategies into your life will be the ‘Key or Magic Wand’ to your financial success and moving toward acquiring a sense of financial security and personal wealth. Hopefully, it will encourage many of you to pursue additional financial knowledge. There’s a lot of your own money you don’t want to let slip through your fingers. Remember the old proverb, ‘A bird in the hand, is worth two in the bush’. So, make sure you keep all your money that’s already in your hand (available to you). Keeping this money means the earlier you get to start valuing your credit score and begin the process of implementing these financial strategies into your lives, the more money you can put to work for you toward your retirement. In pursuit of your career goal of trying to earn more money to catch another bird, please don’t lose sight of the money (bird) you already have available to you. The bird in hand doesn’t cost you anything and you can convert it into ‘the goose that lays ‘Golden Eggs’ if you follow just the ‘Course and Process’. Use the book’s financial literacy knowledge and skills to ‘cash in’ your lottery winnings and to enjoy your lives. You alone have the power to increase your wealth, only if you choose to do so, it’s your choice, so why not? Most importantly why wouldn’t you? People can’t understand why so many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and struggle financially in their quest of living their ‘American Dreams’. Another huge intangible benefit of ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ for society is that it gives them the ‘HOPE’ to aspire to achieve their goals and dreams. The book and course open their eyes so they can see a way out of their current financial crisis, and living situation and gives them the ability to change their financial futures. Once they implement these solutions into their lives and begin to see their savings start to grow, they will experience less stress, more joy, and more happiness. These positive results will make them want to achieve even more. Hopefully, they will share the reasons for their newly found financial successes and encourage family members, friends, and others to follow their lead. The absence of adequate financial literacy has become one of the roots of many of society’s social problems such as poverty, disturbances, conflicts, and violence. As more and more people begin to read ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’, they too will experience the benefits of having the ‘HOPE’ of building their own bridges and clear paths to achieving their goals and dreams. Therefore, they can envision a better future for themselves and their families for generations to come. In time they will become a person of contentment, happiness, and a positive demeanor, which are the by-products of their ability to achieve their personal goals and financial security. As their lives become far less financially stressful, they will begin to exude greater self-confidence, positivity, and a happier demeanor in everything they do. They now are in more ‘control of their lives’ which in itself is a type of freedom, and they can now relax a little and enjoy life. Again, when people now see and realize they have ‘HOPE’, they become focused, and self-motivated, develop plans, and dreams, and set goals to be successful. They will carry this positive focus over to all other aspects of their lives, making them a joy to be around. They will be less depressed and less likely to need to use artificial stimuli or activities to provide them with temporary escapes from the reality of their financially troubled world. The ‘STFF HOPE PROCESS’ is your ticket to success. So, please use the financial literacy educational knowledge you acquired from this book as a ‘Gift’ or ‘Free Pass’ to build a better financial future and claim the multitude of savings and wealth with your name on it. As an American, it is your Constitutional ‘Birth Right’ to have adequate financial literacy knowledge, so you don’t have to struggle so hard financially and have an enjoyable, prosperous, and successful in your journey toward retirement. As you start implementing some of the strategies suggested in this book, please give yourselves time to adjust to the changes you select. It is important to first do a self-assessment of your financial situation to determine what solutions you want to start integrating into your schedule that will be most beneficial for you immediately. For instance, you may elect to cut back on eating out by fifty percent and work on improving your credit score at the same time. This is going to be very easy for you because coming to use the money saved from not eating out as often to start paying down your debt and improving your credit score. Yes, you can gradually reduce expenses while building your credit score and savings. Therefore, you’ll be able to apply two recommended strategies and accomplish three solutions easily with only just one behavior modification change. This is an example of how most of the strategies and solutions are interwoven to benefit you as you use your new financial literacy skills. It may take a few months before you become comfortable with the new strategies you selected. Remember, you will never be able to gain anything worthwhile without making sacrifices. You’ll know change hurts because it works. The endgame rewards are well worth the wait and the short-term inconveniences you feel during the process of change. You can look at your new financial journey similar to that of a caterpillar, most people consider it disgusting to strive to survive its journey through life to reach its end goal of changing into a beautiful butterfly. You too will be able to endure the positive changes you decided to make because the huge financial rewards of sacrifice are great. So don’t procrastinate during your journey, never give up, just follow the ‘Process’ and complete your transformation to financial freedom. The financial literacy knowledge and life skill tools you’ve acquired from reading this book you will have and use for the rest of your lives. More importantly, no one can ever take these life skill tools away from you. They’re yours forever and these are the ‘Keys’ to your financial success and are teachable to anyone you wish. These skills are teachable and cannot be stated with any more conviction. It is one of your primary responsibilities and obligations to teach, educate and share these financial skills with your children and the next generations. The financial literacy knowledge you have learned must be passed on to give them the best chances of financial success. This way the next generation’s financial knowledge and life skill tools will become second nature to them, and they will teach this knowledge to their children and so on. This will give them unlimited opportunities to achieve all their financial dreams and wealth. This is how you begin to change and end the cycle of poverty and the needed dependency on social services in the future. Here's something you may find interesting, as stated before once you have implemented the knowledge of these new life skill tools and made the necessary behavior modifications these characteristics can be applied to other aspects of your life. You now have a new appreciation for maintaining your focus to achieve a goal. If you have bodyweight challenges or health issues, it will be easier for you to have the discipline to follow through with a proven weight loss or health management program. Simply, because you now know how to sacrifice to follow a process to be successful. Just one last thing now that you have finished reading “Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ take a few minutes to congratulate yourself. Then give it so thought and set six to ten or more goals you want to achieve in the next six months by using some of the solutions. Then continue by planning and budgeting how you can use your newly created saving to accomplish your financial goals. Please consider using the blank pages at the end of the book for all your plans, budgets, and goals. You’ll see your savings begin to grow and snowball into more savings and so on. Your goals may be: (1) eat out 50% less (2) pay down my debt, (3) increase and manage my credit score, (4) use the supermarket as a ‘Stock Market, (5) purchase a washer and dryer and or freezer, (6) purchase and or upgrade my vehicle, (7) start a saving account, (8) purchase adequate life insurance, (9) start a retirement fund, (10) treat yourself to a nice dinner and (11) take a modest vacation. Your choices are endless as to what you can do with your ‘earned’ money, just from making a few no-cost behavior modifications. It's been a pleasure sharing with you these ‘Food for Thought’ ideas and general financial literacy knowledge with you. Hopefully, the information to provide and empower you with the necessary life skill tools to change your life. These financial solutions have been shared with you in the hope that you too will change into a financial butterfly flying upward and ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom. Again, the hidden benefits of having increased financial literacy knowledge are that you will consistently be able to make the right financial decisions. This financial wisdom is your possession alone and no one can ever take it away from you. This is repetitive and important; you now have an obligation to share this knowledge with those you love and care about. So, they too can begin their own journey of ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ as you provide them with ‘HOPE’ by Helping Others Prosper thru Education. This is one of the most priceless ‘Gifts’ that you can give of ‘Paying It Forward’. To share this wisdom with others cost you absolutely nothing, so share it with anyone who is willing to listen. Here are a few words of encouragement for you, “if you maintain very good credit, live within your means, purchase a house, commit to saving, and plan for retirement you will be fine. Just remember to; plan, budget, make the necessary sacrifices, be vigilant, stay focused on your goals, remain determined and you too will reach your dreams as you continue ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’”. Now that you have seen many of the benefits of having basic applicable financial literacy knowledge, you are encouraged to take additional and more advanced financial informative courses. This will further increase and improve your financial knowledge of managing, credit, and investing money and it will teach you how to invest your money so that it grows while you’re sleeping. These courses are offered available at local community colleges, online, and or with other financial educational products. These next courses may come with an investment cost. It will also prepare you to spend your money wisely and save for the future. Hopefully, this will help you to better survive the current and future inflationary conditions and Federal Reserve interest rate increase. The more financial knowledge you have the better you’re able to increase and manage your newly earned ‘wealth’ improving the chances of fulfilling your goals and achieving your ‘American Dreams’ even earlier in your lifetime. It also gives you the priceless possession of knowledge which you should pass on to the next generations. As mentioned in Chapter 14, Purchasing a House, one interesting FYI point, let me try to explain to you just how much money you are actually leaving on the table. What is a billion of anything? This is what the number 1,000,000,000 looks like. Yes, that’s a 1, followed by nine zeros. Putting it in some perspective you can ‘relate to’, here goes. It takes 32 years for one billion seconds to pass in time. That also means a billionaire has enough money to spend one dollar every second of every day, seven days a week for thirty-two years without running out of money. You didn’t know that did you? This is why you can’t keep up with the Jones, so stop trying to. Some people just got it like that! Now, here's something you can do if you really want to know what a large sum of money looks like. Take your time over a week or two, try counting 100,000 grains of rice out just to see how what and much it really is and looks like. That’s how much of you’re losing of your money you are losing or leaving behind every time you pay $100,000 in additional interest simply because you have less than a very good credit score. If you are counting out 100,000 grains of rice, it seems a bit too hard to do. Here is a short, count out only ten thousand grains of rice, then get nine additional same containers and fill them up with the same amount of rice. Now you have a visual picture of the amount of money you are leaving behind and you’re not collecting simply because you didn’t know it was available to you to read this book. This confirms that ‘living within your means’ and maintaining excellent credit pays off well beyond your imagination. Or here is that R-word again, the Internet says that there are approximately 8,000 to 9,000 grains of uncooked rice in a cup. This means it takes eleven to twelve cups of rice to make up 100,000 grains of uncooked rice. Measure out ten cups of uncooked rice and dump the rice into a large pot to see how much it is. Then imagine each grain of rice is a one-dollar bill, it’s a lot of money, isn’t it? Here’s a last bit of FYI trivia for you, $100,000 in one-dollar bills would stack about 36 feet high. This way too much money for you to let slip through your fingers, isn’t it? I stand corrected, perhaps unless you got it like that! If you actually take the time to do this, I’m positive you will change your wasteful behavior and spending habits. You will seriously start implementing many of the suggestions and solutions you’ve read throughout this book course, making the necessary changes to increase your future financial security. Can you afford to leave this money on the table? So why aren’t you interested in finding ways to make sure you get those tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars available to you over your lifetime just by simply managing your credit score and making good sound financial purchasing decisions? Hopefully, you’ve been introduced to enough strategic ways to save money and start collecting your ‘sums of the lottery winning’ with your name on it. Just remember your money is finite which means it will run out if you don’t manage it wisely. However, your increased financial literacy is knowledge that you will have and can use for your lifetime to build a better financial future. Trust me, it is a ‘Hell of a lot’ easier to implement a few of the solutions recommended throughout this book course than to earn those tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars that you are currently leaving behind. FYI, $100,000 in after-taxed dollars is valued at about $130,000 in pre-taxed dollars. If you earned $30 per hour, you would have to work 4,334 extra hours to earn this $130,000 you are leaving behind. Or you could simply just take the ‘STFF HOPE PROCESS’ challenge and collect all the money that’s rightfully yours. In life the choices are always yours, so don’t forget it. Math problem: Use your current income to calculate how many hours and how long it would take you to earn $130,000. I’ve had a blast sharing his information with you, I tried to keep it interesting, and informative, and from being boring and too complicated. Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ as well. Hopefully, it has achieved its goal to increase your financial literacy knowledge, motivating you to be proactive in making positive changes to improve your current situations whatever they are. I’m asking you to look at that person in the mirror and challenge yourself to make a commitment to make the necessary behavioral changes to achieve your goals, dreams, and ultimately your financial freedom. Yes, it’s the ‘STFF HOPE PROCESS’ Challenge to everyone. You can do it if you really commit to it. If you purchased this book for yourself, I hope you agree it was helpful and a good investment. If someone purchased this book for you, take a moment to thank them for what they did for you. Take a moment to assess if you are being paid a fair wage at your job or if you have been quite a bit irresponsible and reckless in your spending habits. With this increase in financial literacy knowledge, perhaps you can be more responsible and do a much better job ‘living within your means’. You can now focus on staying with your current employer and making the best of your job opportunity. Now, you may want to start working toward a promotion. Whoever provided this book to you, they have given you the opportunity to open new doors to a much brighter and more successful financial future. So, honor them, yourself, and your loved ones by changing your financial life for the better. Just live by the ‘Golden Rule of Respect’ and the ‘Serenity Prayer’. You’ll be okay if you keep these four personal characteristics front and center in your life, Respect others, maintain peaceful relationships, have the Courage to change what you can, and use Wisdom in all your financial decisions. Now, you understand and believe in the ‘STFF HOPE PROCESS’, following it and you will achieve your dreams. Thank you in advance for your attention, time, and most importantly your promise to use this financial knowledge and life skills tools to change your financial life for the better and achieve your dreams. Good Luck with the ‘STFF HOPE PROCESS’ Challenge, and have a very gratifying, productive, and secure financial future. Be Safe and May God continue to Bless America. As mentioned in the introduction, this Book Course is about increasing your financial literacy to give you the ability to build a better financial future. Therefore, you are encouraged to take the ‘STFF HOPE PROCESS’ challenge to change your current financial situation in less than one year. Good Luck The ‘STFF HOPE PROCESS’ represents, ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom – Helping Others Prosper thru Education – Provides Real Opportunities to Create and Empower Savings and Success’.