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Two ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ states that a basic financial literacy education has the power to help you navigate your way through and avoid many of the financial mazes that could end up as life-long poor financial decisions. These poor decisions can ruin your credit and your ‘American Drea...

Two ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ states that a basic financial literacy education has the power to help you navigate your way through and avoid many of the financial mazes that could end up as life-long poor financial decisions. These poor decisions can ruin your credit and your ‘American Dreams’. The impact of poor credit alone will cause you to struggle financially for many years to come, if not infinitely. It actually steals and robs you of the increased purchasing power of your money and your potential to acquire wealth throughout your lifetime. Many of these financial mistakes are made by most individuals when they first begin their journey into complex worlds of money, credit, and finance which we’ll call ‘Adulting’. In this stage in our lives, we have grown to the age to begin earning money and taking on more adult financial responsibilities. This information allows them to become more aware of the real rules of the game of credit and financing, therefore, becoming more responsible, secure, and financially successful. Along with maintaining and keeping gainful employment, this will assist you in building an invaluable understanding and a solid foundation of how finances work that will put you on a more even playing field. This financial knowledge will help you to modify your behavior, so you won’t have to live paycheck to paycheck and improve your chances of acquiring financial securities and some sense of wealth. You will learn the importance of planning, budgeting, where all your money goes and how to manage your credit score. This helps you become more aware of those opportunities to save and create wealth throughout your life. This information will also help you build and become your very own best successful ‘Personal Brand’, living your best life. It will help you embrace your own true personal identity with self-confidence, a positive demeanor, values, ethics, security, and financial freedom through proper money management. As you begin to embrace and implement some of the suggested strategies and solutions you will see the positive results of your behavior modifications becoming a stronger advocator for embracing even more improvements. Others will see these positive changes in you and want to know what you have been doing to get where you are now? You will also strive toward using the best means of managing your income and crave even more of the savings rewards you’ve earned so easily. You can enjoy the many benefits and accolades of your Personal Brand’s success by virtue of your determination and commitment to maintaining your focus and hard work. You can now begin to plan to make those next step dream investment purchases such as a vehicle, a house, vacations, and plans for your retirement. ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ may be considered one of the best and most cost-effective investments you will ever have an opportunity to make at any time in your life. It provides the reader with over six dozen suggestions, strategies, and solutions that will enable you to achieve a higher state of financial success with little or no additional money. You don’t have to make a whole lot of money, but you must make wiser decisions and purchases with the money to have. If you plan, budget, sacrifice, and manage the money you’ve earned more efficiently you will begin to see positive savings growth which will snowball into huge savings. As you begin to utilize some of the many strategies suggested and implement the solutions into your lives, you will begin to see the potential of large sums of money that will become available to you. It just requires you to have the willpower to plan, budget, commit, sacrifice, and follow your plans making sure you have all your ‘ducks’ in a row. Here are a few characteristics you’ll need to make your financial journey easier. You’ll need to have good time management, punctuality, and organizational skills because you will be doing more things on your own now. These traits show that you need to have order and respect and that things in your life are organized. No worries, you can learn this with practice. The book’s presentation may be a bit different than what you are used to, many of these strategies, suggestions, and solutions are a culmination of financial recommendations the author has shared with his children, family members, and friends over the years. The hopes and goals are quite ambitious, to provide the readers with the necessary financial knowledge, insight, and preparation for their financial journey. Especially the money, credit, and financial management challenges ahead and to avoid the bad decision and mistakes most people make. The author has decided to adopt and address the nation’s youth, young adults, and adult audiences to provide them with the same financial insight and preparation as well. Most people have grown up having only limited if any money, credit, and financial management knowledge and are still expected to achieve success. Therefore, anytime they have an opportunity to increase their financial knowledge you should always welcome it and should listen and absorb the knowledge like a dry sponge. No person can ever have too much knowledge regarding their ability to manage money, and credit, creating financial security and personal wealth. This knowledge will be used over their entire life. I equate it to learning how to swim, everybody should take swimming lessons to learn to swim. The more you practice your swimming skills the more confident and better swimmer you will become. These are lessons on how to manage your money. The many examples referenced throughout the book are similar to the financial challenges you will face during your life in managing your money. The solutions and strategies offered may be different for you based on your age, amount of income and credit history. Again, you may need to input some of your actual numbers as they relate to the examples to customize the situations to best fit your situations. Some of you, based on your age and/or employment status may not be financially ready or prepared to take the next steps in moving forward. However, for those of you who haven’t started working yet, these strategies attempt to provide you with a ‘Head Start’ and an opportunity to learn the techniques needed to apply when you are ready to start managing your money, you don’t make those same mistakes most people make in their lives. The book will provide you with valuable information as needed ‘Food for Thought’ ideas necessary to succeed throughout your financial roller coaster journey through life. The thought process here is, ‘that it is better to have this knowledge and not need to use it than to need this knowledge and not be aware that it even exists at all’. This information will be repeated several different times and in several different ways throughout the following chapters to give you additional opportunities to grasp the concepts intended. ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ uses Internet articles and Data to provide relevant information for which many of the strategic budgeting solutions were developed. If you are willing to follow the suggested strategies introduced in the book to avoid many of the financial pitfalls, you will have a much better chance of maintaining a very good to excellent credit rating score while increasing the overall purchasing power of your money. Increasing your purchasing power is like giving yourself a tax-free raise and having more disposable income. The other reward of being financially responsible can be a saving of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest payments you won’t have to make over your lifetime. This allows you to accomplish many of your short-term and long-term financial goals as well as achieve all of your ‘American Dreams’. The book’s other goals are to provide and empower you with enough general financial knowledge and wisdom to guide you around the most common money mistakes most people make when it comes to making large purchases. This will permit you to face fewer monetary obstacles as you become a responsible financially secure productive member of society. You should have better control of your finances if you didn’t have to go through as many financial pitfalls before you realize there are more efficient ways to manage and budget your income. These solutions will provide you with the foresight and wisdom to plan, budget, and anticipate your future needs and the best ways to finance those needs. What it all boils down to is that having a budget is a critical part of a plan and your strategy as to how you intend to spend your money. Budgeting just means you're planning to spend your money in a predetermined manner on selected monthly expenses before your paycheck arrives, making sure all your overhead bills are paid first. Many people may view a budget as a straitjacket that will keep them from doing what they ‘want’ with their money. However, it actually allows them to do all the things they need to do before they do the things they want to do, like frivolous purchases. It’s the most responsible way to manage your limited income and handle all your financial responsibilities without creating debt. Earning your financial freedom requires that you understand the importance of making many important sacrifices. These necessary sacrifices are contracts or promises with you to delay or forego having something you view as valuable today for something of a much greater reward in the future. Your willingness to make necessary sacrifices requires you to set goals, make plans, and commit yourself to accomplishing them with a sense of focus and determination. Yes, that means cutting back on or giving up some of your ‘crutches’ like eating out, drinking, casino, lottery, and sports betting Apps, and smoking for those of you who are addicted. Technology has made it so easy and convenient to gamble away your money. Have you ever thought, “If I knew what I know now when I was age 15, 18, 21, 25, or 30? How could I be much more financially secure at this time in my life? I shouldn’t have made all those foolish spending decisions wasting soooooo, much money over the years. I would have saved more and would have so much more money at this time in my life.” No matter what stage of your life you’re in, you can make the necessary changes to get on the path to success, it is never too late to turn your credit rating and finances around. The book attempts to encourage you to do all the necessary research, calculations, educate yourself to plan, and budget your money before making any major purchases in order to make the best financial choices. It also encourages the use of your basic math skills to best understand the many money management calculation techniques. Your abilities to implement all the suggested strategic solutions will be directly related to your basic understanding and knowledge of math. The ability to understand math and the relationships of numbers are life skill tools you should have; you will never forget that you’ll always need in order to be financially successful. The world of Finance is all about numbers and the ‘Benjamins’, there’s no way around it. The solution strategies in this book course are explained step by step and you should be able to follow most of the math-related illustrations. Again, money, credit, and finances are all about the numbers, your ability to count, and your knowledge of percentages are the key elements for planning and managing your money. Basic simple math skills will allow you to follow and understand the examples and illustrations to use the recommendations. Please consider taking some fundamental supplemental online or in-class courses to increase your math skills, you will definitely need them down the road. Don’t worry, you can come back to review the math later. This investment will allow you to better understand and receive the maximum benefits from the book’s numerous saving suggestions and calculation justifications for the rest of your life. The Internet is a vast resource and a wealth of information to quench your thirst for knowledge and has all the facts that will empower you to make the best financial decisions. So please use the Internet for your research, it’s fast, free, and unbiased. Remember, research is extremely important to gain the knowledge you need to make good sound financial decisions and quality future purchases. Most people would love to win those two big national lottery drawings, which dreams are made. Believe it or not, everybody has very real potential and the ability to accumulate a sense of wealth and achieve their ‘American Dreams’ over their lifetime. Just remember nothing in life is free, you must work diligently at becoming financially secure. This book will show you how to collect your ‘lottery winning’ or ‘financial rewards’ with; planning, budgeting, sacrifice, and making wise financial choices so you too can accumulate ‘wealth’. The amount of personal savings and financial security you can accumulate over your years of employment can be, somewhere in the neighborhood, of $500,000 plus for an individual and to over $2,750,000 for couples, if your money, credit, and finances are managed properly. By following a planned budget that prioritizes ‘needs’ versus your ‘wants’ and you’re willing to make the necessary sacrifices described you’ll be handsomely rewarded. The amount of your reward can be modest, enormous, or equivalent to winning a large lottery jackpot. This process must begin as soon as you first establish any type of credit and receive any credit cards or loans. Your ability to keep a very good to excellent credit rating will be the most important component of your financial success. It will repay and save you over and over again throughout your financial life well beyond your imagination and expectations. You need to give a lot of thought as early as possible about how much money you’ll need for retirement. Considering the cost of living over the next 40 – 45 years, what amount of your total accumulated financial wealth do you want to have by the time you retire? The sooner you do begin this process, the more time you’ll have and the easier it will be to achieve your goals. Internet Research. Over your lifetime, depending on your occupation and employment choice you’ll earn anywhere between $35,000 to $80,000 per year. Working for 45 years your earnings equate to about $1,575,000 to $3,600,000 respectively over your lifetime. How can you best manage these funds to live a comfortable life now and save to have future financial security? Just remember with cost-of-living increases, a person in 2020 with a $600,000 retirement nest egg would need over $1,610,000 in 2060 to have the same or equivalent purchasing power. So once again, please start planning for your retirement as soon as possible. The sooner you start the more you should have when you retire. For instance, if you have the option to participate in your employer’s matched 401K Plan, please make the sacrifice and participate. Because over 30 years of earning an average of $40,000 per year contributing 6% of your salary you would have amassed over $500,000 at an eight percent return. If you are not able to participate in your company’s 401K plan because you are underemployed earning thirty percent less than your previous job or ‘you are living beyond your means’, you could end up leaving over $250,000 of free employers’ matching contributions money on the table. That’s why you should make participating a priority and plan, budget, and sacrifice to be able to contribute to your employer’s 401K program. Always have adequate medical and dental insurance for times of illness and health issues. This book presents the reader with several ideas and examples on how to increase your overall purchasing power, empowering you to take control of your finances. It will offer you several different clear paths when it comes to making some critical budgeting and purchasing decisions. It attempts to offer the reader options that will help you to avoid the harsh lessons learned from life a.k.a. ‘the School of Financial Hard Knocks’. The book will repeatedly emphasize, “that every dollar you don’t spend today on something you really don’t need, is a dollar that you will have tomorrow to spend on something you might really need in the future’. Or to state it a different way, “every extra dollar you spend on something you ‘want’ today is a dollar you will not have tomorrow to spend on something you may need”. Either way, it tries to encourage responsible spending habits on your part and help you save as much as you can. You cannot expect things to change for the better if you keep on doing the same things over, and over again, that is the definition of insanity. If you strongly consider using some of the strategies in this book, you should minimize wasteful spending and ruining your credit, therefore, reducing the total overall amounts of interest you’ll pay on financed purchases in the future. It will also increase your discretionary income available for other purchases or savings. The rewards for managing your money, credit and finances responsibly would lower interest APR rates on all your lifetime future financed purchases. Again, these lower interest rate payments can add up to tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars not paid in higher interest rate payments. The difference between high and lower interest payments is like increased discretionary income put back into your pockets. This may be more than enough money to pay off your student loans, even from Medical or Law school. You can use a portion of these savings to reward yourself for a job well done with something you may have ‘wanted’. Things like saving for a down payment on a house, vehicle upgrades, increase retirement savings or a vacation, and for building wealth, etc. The benefits of your behavior modification will allow you to strategically reduce your overall spending therefore redistributing your money by prioritizing your needs versus your ‘wants’. The strategies listed in this book will require you to be brutally honest with yourself and make a commitment to make changes now. The sooner you start the process of changing your spending habits the sooner this unplanned and impulsive spending behavior will leave your life. Therefore, the sooner the benefits of these changes will begin to impact your life in a more manageable positive cash-flow manner. We will later visit the importance of credit scores, credit ratings, and credit reports and how they impact your overall long-term finances. There’re illustrations of planning your monthly overhead expenses that must be based on your net income, not your gross income. This process is an attempt to keep you from living beyond your means. In addition, we’ll examine how much money some of your impulsive behaviors are really costing you, most of the time without you ever realizing it. A few minor behavior modifications with very little effort can save you tremendous amounts of money. The amount of this ‘newfound’ money will blow your mind. In general, the book touches on many habits people have been unconsciously engaged in for generations that are not have been in the best interest of their long-term financial security. These examples will expose how unplanned spending has hidden the large amounts of income frivolously spent because of these careless unplanned behaviors. These options are just something to think about, evaluate and take some parts from if not everything to implement into your spending habits to reduce expenses and increase your overall purchasing power. The book will explore major purchases such as vehicles and furniture that requires financing over long periods of time, from 24, 36, 48, 60, 72, and 84 months. What is that financed vehicle really costing you over the years? How much of your net income does your vehicle actually require from your budget? Can you really afford that vehicle? Are there better alternative vehicle choices that are more affordable for you? These are all very valid questions that the book addresses. There will also be comparisons regarding purchasing versus leasing a vehicle. Unfortunately, you cannot choose your family members, so you have to accept whom you get. If you could choose your family members, there would definitely be some changes ‘made up in here’. You all have that bleeding heart relative that just about begs you for a loan, or financial assistance as if you were their last resort until you give in and help them. Then they will try to find ways to weasel out of keeping their part of the loan repayment agreement. However, we do have the power and choice as to whom we let into our lives. There are several positive characteristics you should seek out in those you choose to call friends. These are the same characteristics you should portray and offer to those you call your friends. Here are a few of the characteristics you should have, and should seek in your friends such as caring, honesty, integrity, reliability, kindness, hardworking, dependability, accountability, and respect. Selecting these types of friends confirms strong credible characteristics so when they give their word, they mean what they say. They will honor their word as though it was a written binding contract, these kinds of integrity a very rare to find in people. If someone borrows money from you and promises to repay the money by a specific date, they should hunt you down by that due date to ensure they honor their word and respect your kindness. If they cannot locate you, they should contact you and make sure they save you money for you until they are able to catch up with you. They should never forget that you went out of your way to make their situation easier for them in their time of need of help. You stepped up for them and went out of your way to lend them the money they needed. They should never try to change the verbal agreement or the commitment they made. It is their responsibility to bring it up to you in the event they have not yet repaid you. This is someone who has intentions to repay your money and it should be known as ‘A Word of Honor and or A Promises Kept Agreement’. As a wise woman said, “If a person will cheat, then they will also lie and they will steal.” If you see these signs in someone trying to get close to you, be cautious and interact with them with both of your ‘eyes wide open.’ What you see and observe from them is what you will get. These people somehow will find a way and manage to repay those financial institutions that can negatively impact their credit scores or repossess the items they financed. However, for some reason, they don’t respect the kindness of those who have chosen to sacrifice their own money to help them out of a financial jam. People would label them as selfish. Many of you may already know that finding these great honest characteristics in people is extremely difficult and rare. Lending a small amount of money to a ‘friend’ can be a true test for weeding out those people who are not in your life for the right or positive reasons. Many of them are not happy with their current state of accomplishments or successes in their life and maybe just plain jealous. Many of you may have already known and encountered these types of people who want to be your friend for the wrong reasons. How did that work out? You should want to make a list of character requirements you seek in people to screen the people you allow into your lives. You should never waiver from, compromise, or made expectations to this list. This personality filters you developed to help you minimize the drama in your life. This allows you to focus on the more positive things like achieving goals that require your undivided attention. As mentioned earlier, you must be open-minded and willing to make positive changes in your lives. If you haven’t begun your financial journey yet, ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ will better prepare you for what lies ahead in your financial future. Use this book as a tool, a road map, and a reference to help you plan and navigate the way you pursue your goals and dreams. Hopefully, you will take away many of the solutions presented here and implement them. Incorporating these solutions should allow you to best plan and prepare for many of the monetary and financial challenges you will face throughout your life. As you read this book there are several key points to your financial freedom; your ability to achieve and maintain a very good to excellent credit score and your ability to save money. The success of your financial freedom also requires you to plan, budget, commit and sacrifice many of your conveniences to achieve your goals. You will notice that similar points are made over and over in the same chapter and may be repeated throughout the book. This redundancy of specific points was done intentionally because repetitiveness can be viewed as an effective teaching tool for a better understanding and comprehension of new subject materials. Many people learn better from reading, hearing lyrics and information over and over again. It’s okay if you skip over some of the material you may not identify with now and can come back to some of these chapters later. ‘Soaring Toward Financial Freedom’ provides you with basic ‘101’ money management and financial literacy information to make you more knowledgeable about the ‘ins and outs’ of money, credit, and financing. View this book as a menu of inexpensive courses of ‘Food for Thought’ common sense money, credit and finance management techniques. You should also view the financial knowledge you obtain as an educational tool that prepares you for a successful future. So, let’s make the best efforts to bypass and skip past many of the money mistakes most people learned from ‘Life’s School of Hard Knocks’. This street school usually provides you with a lot of opinionated incorrect information from unreliable sources. If you base financial decisions on this information, it is more than likely not your best option. You need to have correct financial literacy knowledge to survive the complex world of money and credit as you go through life. I am quite sure you know many people who are confused, fumbling, and struggling through the many financial mazes and challenges in their lives. Here’s another interesting question, if people close to you have financial literacy, budgeting, and planning knowledge, why haven’t they shared it and/or taught it to you? It’s probably because they don’t really know how the money, credit and finance system operates either. They’ve just been a little lucky so far in life. The book is an overview course for a better understanding of the complex worlds of money, credit, and finance you all must travel through as you grow up and move on through life. It will help you ‘build bridges and clear paths from financial illiteracy and challenges to financial capabilities and freedom. Once develop a vision and cross over those bridges you have built, you’ll be on the way to clear paths toward your goals, and you will be able to achieve your ‘American Dreams’. So, to sum up, what can this book do for me? It will provide you with a plethora of over sixty necessary ingredients for you to create your own personal recipe for success. These major ingredients consist of suggestions, strategies, solutions, examples, and calculations to increase your financial literacy knowledge. It includes the many benefits of planning, budgeting, sacrificing, investing and savings of making the best financial decisions to change and move your lives forward. Simply implementing these life skill tools in your life will help you avoid the many financial pitfalls and mistakes that can create massive debt and ruin your financial life. This recipe provides you with the knowledge needed to collect as many of your ‘Lottery Winning’ which are available to you just for the taking. You will find blank pages at the end of each chapter to write down your thoughts, questions and plans. Additional pages are provided in the back of the book for your convenience to take notes. So please, write down anything and everything you feel is important and may want to research or follow up on for clarification. You may also want to use these pages to make notes on how to plan your monthly budget and those things you are going to start cutting back on or eliminate together. How do you improve and maintain a very good credit score? Your short-term and long-term goals and savings plans etc. So, use the pages to write down ideas and plans you come up with so you can refer back to them later if you need to. In order to be interactive and receive the maximum benefits from this financial literacy course, it is recommended that you have some sort of notebook available to use. You should also have a calculator handy to follow the numerous math examples and input your personal information to tailor the calculations to your specific situations. The notebook will provide you with ample space to write down all your personal goals, plans, savings, and strategies. You can project and forecast how the changes will impact and affect your budget and goals. This will serve as a reference that you should revisit monthly, quarterly, and semi-annually to make sure you are still on course. The information is there for quick access in the event, you need to make an adjustment of your numbers based on real-life situation changes in future references. The goal is that after a few months, you should have settled into your new routine of planning and budgeting system and craving to add more and more of the suggestions found throughout the book. With the addition of each new strategy implemented, you will get closer to maximizing your collection and accumulation of all the available savings and wealth to you throughout your financial journey in life.