be independently wealthy

My self imposed exile and resulting poverty has taught me delayed gratification in aces!
It was a concept I could not grasp until my life shattered and I had to start from scratch. For the last 10 years I just gave up…believed that no matter how hard I worked or what I did it would all disappear anyway.

I’m looking at the modest progress I have made here in the past 2 years without really trying. It is meager but I learned I am a survivor. My spirit may have been bruised but it wasn’t broken!

It’s time for me to get back in the game. In reality we can’t take it with us…but we can enjoy it along the way and pave a nicer road for those that come after us. :)

I want to be independently wealthy, worth $51 million

I once had lots of money, now I don’t, through choices of my own, and am tired of worrying about money.

This seems such a lofty goal, but it sorta attracts me!! :))

Fits in nicely with a few of my other goals too, no? :))

Anyway, no idea how to go about this, but I guess I would need passive income (& some active income, at the beginning at least) & later on enough investments to go cheerily about it all, no? :)

By: Brian Tracy

The high road to becoming a self-made millionaire in America is starting and building your own business. But this is not as easy as it sounds. Most businesses started by inexperienced people fail. Probably the primary reason why people don’t start businesses is because they’re afraid that they’re going to lose their money and for good reason. 99 percent of businesses started by people lacking business experience fail within the first two or three years.

Why Businesses Fail
And why is that? It’s because they don’t know how. They haven’t the slightest idea how to make a business successful. They may have an idea for a product or service, but they don’t know all the things that they need to know to run a successful business.

Why Businesses Succeed
However, surprisingly enough, 80 percent of businesses started by experienced businesspeople succeed. Now why should this be so? The reason is because experienced businesspeople know what to do. They know how to purchase their products and their services. They know how to negotiate with their suppliers. They know how to raise money. They know how to negotiate leases. They know how to sell and to market. They know how to manage their finances. In other words, experience is the key. In order to start your own business and succeed, you have to learn how.

Control Your Costs
The second reason that businesses fail, 46 percent, is because of poor cost control. They may be selling enough on the front end, but they’re losing so much on the back end that they go broke anyway. Sales and marketing, financing and cost control, both require experience. And if you’re serious about becoming financially independent, you have to learn how to do both of these.

Put Luck On Your Side
You must learn the skills you need to be successful. Business success is not a matter of luck. Business success is a matter of application. It’s a matter of ability. It’s a matter of experience and skill and intelligence, and wonderfully enough, you can learn what you need to know to be successful.

And you can start by learning through on-the-job training, which is called OJT. Most successful businesspeople become successful because they get all their training by working for someone else.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to make sure that your business succeeds greatly:

First, take the time to get the knowledge and experience you need in business by working for someone else where you can learn a lot in a short period of time. Go to work in an area in which you are interested and learn everything you possibly can.

Second, read and study in business, especially entrepreneurial business, all the time. Read one or two business books per week and read every business magazine that is published on your subject. Never stop learning and growing.

I receive a weekly motivational newsletter regarding the mortgage industry by Brian Peart. His story this week can apply to us all.

There was a man who lived in a small southern town, so small it only had one traffic light. This man was renowned throughout the area for his vast wealth and wisdom – all of it self-made.

A young man came to him one day and said, “Sir, I am a mortgage person and I am trying so hard but the market is tough and I am just barely getting by. What advice can you give me to help me succeed?” The old wise man eyed the young man carefully, and with a voice that almost seemed nonchalant he said, “Stop trying”. The young man was taken aback – mortified he said, “Do you mean I can’t succeed?” To which the wise man said, “No, you can’t try. Either you do or you don’t do – there is no try!” At this he excused himself, signaling their time together was over. The young man dwelled on those thoughts the whole ride home. He couldn’t sleep that night.

The next morning he woke up on fire. He had come to grips with this thought over the night and realized the truth of it. He had been just going through the motions this past year. Waking up, heading into an office, doing the same old same old and hoping for the results he used to have. The bad market allowed him to excuse his weakening paycheck to his wife and most importantly, to himself and he was almost lulled into a state of mediocrity – trapped in the realm of “try”. Avis has been trying harder for 30 years and has not been able to overtake Hertz, but Enterprise did it in 5 years. How? They changed the game. This young man realized, finally – before it was too late, that the game had changed. The same old, same old wouldn’t work anymore – a new game must be learned. Fired up, he realized – he needed to change the rules of the game to work around his strengths. He did some hard thinking, analyzed his strengths, sought help in the areas of his weaknesses and the rest is history.

Are you stuck in the mindset of “try”? Is it time for you to take stock, learn a new game, catch fire again? Most people I talk to are telling me their marketplaces are picking up – opportunities are everywhere for those who stop trying and start doing. And the tools to tap these new opportunities are all around you – and inexpensive. You can make June the month you re-make yourself and change the game for the second half of the year. Where you are this coming December is NOT dependant on where you have been the last year, but what you do now and moving forward. No excuses, no trying, just cranking and getting it done. Are you ready? The time is now – the market is ripe. There ARE people closing tons of loans and making it happen. They are no better than you. They just got the knowledge they needed and applied it relentlessly – no excuses, no holds barred. You can do the same. I hope this story inspires you to do just that. The book of your life lies open before you – the rest is still unwritten. Write an awesome story!

By: Brian Tracy

The major mental obstacle to financial success is that some people believe that they don’t really deserve to be rich.

The Biggest Demotivator of All
They have been raised with a steady drumbeat of destructive criticism, as I was, that has led them to conclude, at an unconscious level, that they don’t really deserve to be successful and happy. The worst effect of negative experiences in childhood, which are all too common, is that when people actually do succeed as the result of hard work, they feel guilty. These guilt feelings then cause them to do things to get rid of the money, to throw it away. They spend it or invest it foolishly. They lend it, lose it or give it away. They engage in self-sabotage, in the form of overeating, excessive drinking, drug usage, marital infidelity and often dramatic personality changes. To change your results with money, you have to change your attitude toward it.

Treat Money With Care and Attention
The fact is that money is very much like a lover. It must be courted and coaxed and flattered and treated with care and attention. It gravitates toward people who respect it and value it and are capable of doing worthwhile things with it. It flows through the fingers and flees from people who do not understand it, or who do not take proper care of it.

Become Skilled With Money
Sometimes people say that they are not very good with money. But being good with money is a skill that anyone can learn through practice. Usually, saying that one is not very good with money is merely an excuse or a rationalization for the fact that the person is not very successful or disciplined with money. The person has not learned how to acquire it or to hold on to it.

Be A No-Limit Thinker
The starting point of accumulating money is for you to believe that you have an unlimited capacity to obtain all the money that you will ever need. Look upon yourself as a financial success just waiting for a place to happen. And see yourself as deserving all you can honestly acquire.

Open Any Door
Money is good. Money gives you choices and enables you to live your life the way you want to live it. Money opens doors for you that would have been closed in its absence. But just like anything, an obsession can be hurtful. If a person becomes so preoccupied with money that he loses sight of the fact that money is merely a tool that is to be used to acquire happiness, then money becomes a harmful thing.

Money is Neutral
The Bible says, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” It doesn’t say, “money is the root of all evil.” It says, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” It is the preoccupation with money, to the exclusion of the really important things in life that is the problem, not the money itself. Money is essential to our lives in society. It is also neutral. It is neither good nor bad. It is only the way that it is acquired and the uses to which it is put that determines whether it is helpful or hurtful.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action:

First, recognize and accept that virtually everyone who has money today at one time was broke and probably broke for a long time. Then they learned the skills of accumulating money and they are now financially independent. Whatever they have done, you can probably do as well.

Second, become a student of money from this day forward. Study it, learn about it and apply the lessons you discover toward your own financial life until you begin to attract more and more money in your direction.

By: Brian Tracy

The Five Roads to Financial Success in America and How to Choose Your Own
There are basically five ways that you can become wealthy starting with nothing in America based on over 25 years of research into American millionaires. Number one, you can inherit it. Less than 10 percent of wealthy Americans inherited any of their money, and it’s less and less every single year.

The Second Way
The second way that you can become wealthy is you can achieve it professionally. You can become a doctor or a lawyer or an architect or an accountant. You can become extremely good at what you do, be paid very well, and hold on to the money.

The Third Way
The third way you can achieve it is you can become a senior executive of a large corporation. You can be highly paid; you can have stock options and bonuses. And if you stay with the company long enough, for enough years, you can be paid enough to become wealthy.

The Fourth Way
You can win it. But only a tiny fraction of one percent of wealthy Americans got that way by winning their money some way or another. As a matter of fact, the odds against you winning the lottery are the equivalent of lightning striking twice in the same place. They’re millions and millions to one.
The Best Way
The fifth way that you can become wealthy is you can start your own business and earn it all by yourself. Starting your own business has been and will always be the high road to becoming wealthy for most self-made millionaires. Entrepreneurship in America offers more opportunities and opens more doors than all other possibilities put together. This is why it has been said that if you have the ability to start your own business and you don’t do it, you are a fool. I’ll repeat that. If you have the ability to start your own business and you don’t do it, you’re a fool.

Where do you start?
You start by getting your finances under control. The very first thing you do is you make a decision to get your finances under control. Some years ago, a man named George Classon wrote a book called The Richest Man In Babylon. It’s a classic on financial success and what Classon said in that book was that the key to becoming wealthy is to pay yourself first. Take ten percent off your earnings, off your gross income every month and put it aside. Learn to live on ninety percent or less of your gross income. So the very first thing that you do is you begin to save your money.

Action Exercises
Now, here are two things you can do immediately to put yourself onto the high road to personal wealth:

First, resolve today to begin saving your money a little bit at a time. Set a goal to save 10% of your earnings, to put it away and to never touch it. This will change your life.

Second, immediately register your own business or sole proprietorship. Open a bank account, get business cards and letterhead and create the corporate entity under which you can do business. Your business opportunities will appear far sooner than you think. If you build it, they will come.

Texas A & M reports:

Fort Worth may be insulated from economic turndown

Fort Worth) – While the nation’s financial markets struggle to deal with an economic downturn, Fort Worth and Tarrant County appears to be insulated from the issue, according to real estate leaders at the 2008 Tarrant County Real Estate Forecast. Job growth related to the Barnett Shale play and affordability continue to insulate Fort Worth and the nation from a sluggish housing market and weakening economy, and the trend should extend for a good while longer. Fort Worth has become one of the best cities for growth and job creation in the nation. Forbes recently ranked Fort Worth – the 18th largest city in the United States – as the fifth best city in the nation for jobs in 2008 and one of five Texas cities in the top 20 along with Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. The Fort Worth-Dallas area is now the fourth largest metro area in the country, with an average of 140,000 new residents moving here per year. Significant developments coming online for delivery in 2008 or 2009 will add to an already healthy market.

Why am I staying here anyway?

I never thought I would want to be rich as much as I do, but time has taught me that money gives you opportunities and freedom. That’s what I want…plenty of opportunities for me and my family, plus lots of freedom to take advantage of the opportunities.