Wisdom of Rich Dad

Recently released numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis show that the US once again has an increasing personal savings rate. Unfortunately, this rate has been declining for decades as Americans began living increasingly beyond their means.

On more than one occasion the savings rate even dipped into negative territory, meaning that America’s population in aggregate was borrowing more than it was saving. This high consumption rate in turn has led to excessive borrowing, which was the ultimate cause of the financial crisis that occurred last year.

Generation Y, my generation, seems to have particular difficulty saving money. First off, we’re still relatively young, and young people in general are less inclined to think long term. However, young adults today are worse than previous generations in that they see disposable income and no need to save a portion.

This inability to save is partially the fault of parents. Many simply never taught their kids to save. Mine was the generation of the allowance. Parents thought they were teaching us a lesson and that by giving us a defined amount for any given period, we would learn to budget. Instead, kids got their allowance and viewed every cent as spending money.

To people who never think about the benefits of saving, allow me to introduce the 8th Wonder of the World: Compound Interest. Consider the following examples:

1. Let’s say that at age 25 a person had accumulated $10,000 to invest. If they can earn, say 10% per year for round numbers, on average, how much will he have at age 60, assuming he never contributes another dollar?

2. What if that same person waited until age 30? How much would they have at 60 then?

3. And if they waited until age 35, what’s there at 60?

The answers can be found at the end of the blog. Keep in mind that those results reflect growth with no additional savings. To see even more phenomenal results, consider the following:

4. Let’s say I have a friend who’s 25 years old and has little or no savings to date. Realizing the predicament he may face in the future, he has decided to adjust his spending habits to start saving $100 per week. While this is no large sum, let’s say he continues this pattern of saving for the next 35 years. Assuming 52 weeks per year and an average annual return of 10%, how much will my friend have when he’s 60?

The real concept here is to let your money work for you. For continued reading on the subject, we strongly recommend Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, which explains accounting and saving in terms that are much easier to understand than textbooks.

The lesson here is simple: Save early. By putting money back early on, you allow it to accumulate over an extended period of time with little or no extra work. The reality is that the young adulthood comprises some of the prime saving years. It’s the time before we start our own families and have kids, while living expenses are relatively lower. This is the time before diapers, toys, babysitters, Disney World, and, if they’re lucky enough, kid’s college tuition, room and board, etc.

The bottom line is to save early so you can afford to live better later on. And, perhaps most importantly, when you do have kids, pass the lesson on. Don’t make them learn the hard way.

Answers: 1. $ 281,024 2. $174,494 3. $108,347 4. $1,550,259

Dock David Treece is a stockbroker licensed with FINRA. He works for Treece Financial Services Corp.

I think that I’ve always been attracted to the prospect of increasing cashflow because of what it represents. To me, it’s always been a symbol for life leverage: the ability to increase one’s options for action.

We feel alive when we are free – to feel free is at least closely related to feeling alive in the sense of feeling an excitement for living. Recall the last time you were travelling to a new country or location you’d never been to, or the thrill of meeting someone special, or finishing a story or painting of your own creation, or the simple pleasures that come with having an unexpected, free day to spend exactly how you want it, or the thoughts you had after seeing a powerfully moving film, or receiving an unexpected but welcome windfall of money.

Maybe a different situation comes to mind to you. I’m guessing you may have felt thrilled and quite inspired. To be inspired, etymologically speaking, is Latin for “having the breath of God inside you.” The Greek equivalent is to have enthusiasm – from entheos, “to be in God.” “God” can refer to however you conceive a higher power or higher intelligence ordering things – whatever turns out to be above beyond the realm of mere human consciousness and human life.

To create life leverage is to access more of this feeling of inspiration and enthusiasm. It is to move closer to that part of you that feels this way or is “in touch” with your own “divine spark” so to speak; the part that leads you to take – as Joe Vitale has said – “inspired action.”

Imagine feeling that way all the time? Of course you’d have your ups and downs, too, but in general the more actions and options that are open to us, I think, is one of the key ingredients for how good we can feel.

One of the worst feelings is to “feel stuck” in our lives – we must be in a certain place at a certain time for other people so we can please their clients and customers; or how about the feeling of having absolutely no time or space to oneself? That can really wear down your health after a while.

So here are some quick thoughts on how we can better get in touch with or create more of this life leverage.

(1) Have a plan. You might not have a huge global plan that you can fit over all parts of your life just yet, but I think it’s probably a good thing if you can at least have a plan running and working within certain aspects of your life, such as finances and investments.

Having a plan might help you “keep all your ducks in a row,” so to speak, so that instead of squandering your energy in various places or on various methods, your energy, resources, and money are all lined up and moving in the same direction. This cuts down on drag and resistance to where you need to go.

(2) Work as much as possible from a place of inspired action. I’ve noticed that with the accomplishments I’ve been proud of, and the great people that I have met, that these have all flowed outwards from an original place of inspired action that I once took.

For example, deciding to take a certain class “on a whim” because you feel attracted to that topic – and lo and behold, you meet a great friend there, who later introduces you to someone else who teaches you about something else you had been looking for for quite a while.

I’m sure you get the idea here. These chains of connections, I’m guessing, tend to happen when we originally move from a place of inspiration. When we’re stuck in our “same old, same old” routines and mindsets we act, think and perceive in the “same old” ways.

(3) Stick to what’s essential. A simplistic way to put this is to call it “focus,” but what focus really means is this. Cut out (or put on hold) the unnecessary parts of your life. Block out distractions (first you need to figure out what the distractions really are).

Figure out what 20 percent of your actions are giving you 80 percent of your results. Focus on this 20 percent first and foremost, before moving on to that other 80 percent.

I remember starting to put this principle into play when I was in my final year of undergrad (yeah, maybe I should have implemented it sooner). Between applying to grad schools, commuting two hours to teach a course, and taking 6 courses of my own, on top of all the day-to-day errands of living, I really needed a way to feel like I was still moving ahead and getting stuff done.

(4) Follow your muse(s). This is different from #2. When you work from a place of inspired action, you’re already inspired. You’re acting, you’re an agent of inspiration. You’re not looking outward for things, you are just creating, so to speak, from inside yourself when you decide to take a different walk today, or try a different restaurant, or take a spontaneous vacation because you’ve been getting really strong signals lately about all things Costa Rica.

Following your muse, however, is about knowing what inspires you and staying in touch with it. It’s the place where you can go for your “fix.” A voice that reassures you, “yes, there’s a way out of this. You can get ahead. You’re doing it. Keep going.” Whatever you find yourself returning to over and over.

Lately, for me, it’s great financial books. More generally, though, whenever I travel I get the feeling. It’s so easy to wake up at 4am. with enthusiasm for making it to the airport on time in order to head off to a place I haven’t been to yet.

Another way to put this is to ask what will wake you up again when you’ve been sleeping for a while in your life? Have you seen the recent film Flawless starring Michael Caine and Demi Moore? Remember the scene where Laura Quinn is sitting at her office desk and reading the old “self-help” notes she wrote to herself? Coming across one of these reminders again when you’re feeling “stuck” can be the burst of energy you need.

But what about cashflow?
These are four ingredients that I know have worked for me. I’m sure there might be others. I am not sure about the place of cashflow in all of this. I don’t think that cashflow is merely a means to an end – i.e., just a way to be able to do the things you want. I think that in the beginning, increasing your cashflow can be much, much more beneficial than that. If you’re a student or anyone else living below the poverty line, for example, boosting your cashflow can help you make significant advances with your life and your energy. If you’re a multimillionaire and you’ve pretty well got the basics of what you need to be happy, more cashflow isn’t going to be as beneficial (unless you’re operating a vast charity network, or something similar).

I wonder if this all sounds very vague or if it creates any new connections for any reader. We’ve all read some of the same inspirational texts and have shared many of the same experiences, no doubt. I think that the next thing to do is to bring them altogether and work on synthesis and synergy. Oftentimes, progress in my own thinking occurs when I’m able to see two things side by side that were previously known only in isolation. So I’m going to try to work harder at that here, too, and draw more bits together that were previously left in scattered array.

The new credit card reform law is full of good consumer protections, but here’s one you might not know about: It’s going to require companies like FreeCreditReport.com (owned by credit bureau Experian) to clearly state that their services aren’t actually free.

Who doesn’t love those FreeCreditReport.com commercials? You know, the ones featuring the lovable 20-something singing about his credit troubles in a variety of musical genres? In the first, he’s dressed in pirate gear and crooning about how he has to work in a seafood restaurant because his identity was stolen (it works best if you don’t think too hard about it). My favorite jingle is the one that has him singing about how he married his dream girl, only to find out that her credit was bad, too. You can see all the commercials here:

The only  problem, of course, is that FreeCreditReport.com is not really free. In order to get your report through the site, you must sign up for a trial membership in the site’s “Triple Advantage Credit Monitoring” program. If you don’t cancel your membership within a 7-day trial period, you’re billed $14.95 a month. And plenty of people have fallen for the site’s promise without realizing they were going to be billed. The Better Business Bureau has received 9,865 complaints about the site in the last 36 months, with some complainants saying that they kept being billed even after canceling membership.

But now, thanks to the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act, companies touting free credit report services must disclose in their ads that consumers are entitled by law to receive a free credit report from each of the three credit bureaus, and that the official web site to obtain them is AnnualCreditReport.com. And radio and TV ads must clearly state, in both the audio and the video, “This is not the free credit report provided for by federal law.”

That’s good news, since the web-only public service commercials the Federal Trade Commission created in response to FreeCreditReport.com’s ads need all the help they can get:

London Business School professor John Mullins says now is a great time to start a business. He writes in the WSJ:

Costs are lower, and more talent is available, thanks to layoffs. Prospective clients are more likely to try a new supplier who can help them cut costs or increase their competitiveness. Established players, too, are focused on cutting costs instead of increasing market share.

Of course, starting a business means finding funding, and finding means writing a business plan.

In his very long WSJ article, Mullins explains what not to do when writing one up. We’ve boiled it down to five bullet points:

• Don’t focus on your amazing technology. Focus on the customer need your business will solve.
• Don’t overestimate the size of an untapped market, and then claim your business will only need to capture a small slice of it. In untapped markets, the consumers don’t know they need a product yet and they don’t know how to get it. Mullins calls these the “Coke-for-Every-Kid plans.”
• Don’t stretch the numbers. Mullins quotes an entrepreneur who says, “With a couple of beers and an Excel spreadsheet, you can make a lot of money in no time.” Don’t try it.
• Don’t lead with your resume. Investors don’t care how many Harvard MBAs there are on your team.
• Don’t ignore the risks your business will face. Investors know all businesses have their weaknesses. Don’t be naive and try to pretend yours won’t.

Watch Rich Dad’s recent interview on FOX Business with Neil Cavuto to gain insight on Robert’s thoughts on our current challenging economic times. 

With Robert at his best, get his no-nonsense recommendations on how to recognize wealth building opportunities in weak market conditions.

Peter Dickson is the voice of ITV, X-Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, Family Fortunes to name a few.

He’s made a record about the credit crunch and the BBC have banned it, ‘its too politically sensitive’ say the Beeb. Help him get the record into the charts so the BBC have to play it!

Do you like the action of the banks in recent months? No, they’ve taken our money. When was the last time you needed some cash, say several billion and you were given it? Come on …