Do you want to make something out of yourself? Do you want to be rich? What did you do today to get yourself closer to your goal?

Most people want something. Some people want to find a wife/husband, get married and have children. Others, want to have successful careers. Still, others have even more specific wants and goals, but no one seems to want to work toward them. Why?

Simple: They don’t want it bad enough. You can have anything in this world as long as you want it bad enough. Anything.

If the desire within yourself is strong enough, you will overcome any obstacles. If you listen to interviews with successful people, or people who have accomplished great things, you will hear common themes among them. One major theme is, “never give up.” This is easier said than done. In order to succeed you must never give up and never stop trying. If you do, you will fail. Guaranteed.

The second thing you will hear is: Do not let anyone tell you it can’t be done or that you cannot do it. If Bill Gates would have listened to other people telling him he couldn’t create OS software, he wouldn’t be the richest person in the world. If Micheal Jordan would have listened to all the kids in his high school that told him he couldn’t play basketball, he would have never been the greatest and most recognizable sports hero of all time. Never let anyone tell you that you cannot accomplish your goals.

There are thousands of people accomplishing their goals and living their dreams everyday. Why can’t this be you? It can! Believe in yourself, and you shall succeed.

Take a look at yourself. How many excuses can you come up with? They may sound like, “My parents were broke,” or, “No one has showed me how to make money.”

Do you really think any of this matters? Really? My answer is no. If you want something bad enough, you will ignore every excuse and just do whatever you have to in order to get what you want. YOU CAN DO IT! Stop making excuses, get off the couch and do it!

Today, I attended a class as a part of my continuing education at JP Morgan Chase. The subject of the class was investments and retirement planning. One of the presenters was the national sales representative for JP Morgan Funds. I was flat out amazed at not only what he told us but also his presentation. He was both electric and informative.

At one point in the presentation, he covered the financial ups and downs of the US economy, markets, and the corresponding presidents. The US economy has definitely had its good times and bad times. After he drew out this timeline, he asked our class if we knew how much $100 would be worth today, if we had invested it in the market, and recieved around 9% interest every year tax deferred. Of course, no one came close to the correct answer. It was astonishing - the answer was over $2 million dollars!

At an average return of 9% over the course of eighty years, because of compound interest, you would be a millionaire with an initial investment of just $100 dollars. It sounds unbelievable. However, he showed us the math, we checked it and it was correct.

Think of the implications this has. I wish that I could have him present this information to all the young people in the world and all the other people out there who have not started saving, let alone started planning for retirement. It takes discipline and dedication to save for retirement. However, the younger someone starts the more time he/she has to accumulate wealth and the smaller amount the initial contribitions has to be.

There are alway going to be fluctuations in the market. Meaning, the stock market will go through periods of both ups and downs. This is guranteed. It is also a sure thing that the market over time is going to go up. We should all be investing for the long-term.

The national sales representative also explained another important concept when investing: He said, “It is always a good time to invest money into the market.” This is because over time, the market will always increase as a whole. The representative was referring to investing in a balanced portfolio that is fully diversified. Diversification is a crucial topic that I will save for a later post.

Please take this information to heart. Do yourself, your family, and the rest of us a huge favor and take control of your finances!

…and why you need to take your personal finances very seriously…

Let me ask you a question. Do you think someone who makes $400,000 annually worries about finances? You would be surprised - it happens more than you would think. Salary alone does not determine financial success. One can have a fantastic salary complete with a high stardard of living, but with high monthly expenses. There are others who have relatively low monthly expenses, modest salaries, but still have considerable liquid assets.

Most people do not start out making a large income, complete with pension, and retirement contribution. They start out making far less. The future millionaires learn to budget themselves well and learn to put money away every month. The ones who will not be financially secure simply spend what they earn. So, as time goes on, their salaries increase along with monthly expenses and standard of living, but there is no increase in savings or investments.

In order to be truly wealthy, you must take personal finance very seriously. Learn to budget yourself from a young age. Pay for everything using as little credit as possible. As your income goes up, so should the amount you are investing and saving.

Therefore, I would say that someone who earns a large salary can live richly. However, unless the person has a large savings pool and little-to-no debt, they aren’t wealthy.

It is impossible for me to stress this concept enough - saving and investing is crucially important if you want to become wealthy. This will be a major theme in my blog. My goal is help educate others and also to learn from outside experiences and recommendations.

Have you thought about how others perceive you? Do they think you are trustworthy, lazy, maybe sarcastic? Do you really know? This is an extremely important concept when dealing with people, especially in a business sense.

Whether you realize it or not, people are judging your character by your appearance, body language, personality, communication ability, and those you associate with. Strive to live up to the standards to those you see as most successful.

This may seem like common knowledge; however, few fully grasp it. Take a look at Donald Trump - he acts, dresses, and speaks in ways that attracts new business partners and reassures current ones. Can you imagine seeing The Donald in a torn up t-shirt, using Ebonics? That would never happen. He has thousands of people a day depending on him to maintain his image. While Donald Trump may be an extreme example, you must realize that others’ perception of you is something you should take seriously.

The first step is to simply be conscious of the fact that others may perceive you differently than you perceive yourself. You should also be aware of the fact that you never know when an opportunity to network will come up. You could be at the mall, working out, at work, or filling up with gas. Always be prepared for this situation. Always be ready to sell yourself.

5 Tips To Better Sell Yourself

1. Maintain excellent hygiene.
2. Always act in a way that your potential business partners would approve of.
3. Be polite, courteous and understanding.
4. Keep in mind what you may be communicating through your attire, no matter what the occasion is.
5. Look those whom you’re speaking to in the eye, and most importantly, be confident!

Whether you make $25,000/year or $250,000/year, it is still possible to be either wealthy or broke. Broke? On $250,000/year? I agree that it sounds ridiculous, but it is too common of a story. You also may ask, “How can I be wealthy on my modest $25,000/year salary?” It is simply living within your means, being able to put a certain amount away each month/year, and then letting compound interest do the rest.

First of all, I would define being wealthy as the ability to not have to work and maintain a desired lifestyle. This is different for everyone. There are almost an unlimited number of financial/retirement calculators on the web, and I encourage everyone to take advantage of these ASAP. I know there are many ways to build wealth, but I will try to explain how to do it in the simplest terms possible.

We can use the two figures I mentioned earlier ($25,000/year and $250,000/year). Let’s first look at the person making the measly $25,000 per year. For arguments sake, let us also assume that this person is 25 years old and will never receive a pay raise. She wants to retire sometime, but doesn’t know exactly when. We can also assume that this person wants to maintain her lifestyle when in retirement.

This person spends $500/month in rent, owns his/her car, spends $175/month on gas, $300/month on food, and $100/month on miscellaneous. This totals $1075/month in living expenses. While this would definitely be living very minimally, it is possible to live this way. This would give this person approximately $1000 per month to work with. This person also has around 40 years until she will retire.

Let’s say that she took $500/month and put it into an online savings account making around 5% and the other $500/month and put it into a brokerage account making an average of 6-10%. After one year of doing this, she would have a little over $6000 in each account, and be 26 years old. Already, this is more than most others her age. At 30, this person would have around $35,000 in the 5% savings account and at an average of 8% in the brokerage account, it would be worth about $37,000 which is a nice start to retirement.

Now, let’s assume that this person buys a small house or condo and her mortgage payment is only $500/month because of great credit, significant down payment ($30,000), and inexpensive home value(under $200,000). Let’s say at this point the person wanted to save only $200 a month into her savings account and bump up the amount being put into the brokerage account to $800/month.

At age 40, this person would have around $32,000 in her savings account, and in her brokerage account she would have around $230,000. This time, let’s say she wants to keep $7,000 in her savings to cover six months worth of expenses just in case something happens. At this time, I would also recommend looking at her mortgage, and shop around to see if she can refinance to get a better rate. This person uses $15,000 to buy a new/used car and moves the other funds into her brokerage account (which would now total around $241,000).

Let’s assume now that she figures out that she wants to retire at age 60. How much money is she going to have upon retirement? Will she be able to maintain her lifestyle while paying for extra things like medical expenses? Well, when she reaches the age of retirement (60 in this case), she will have approximately $19,000 in her savings and in her brokerage account she would have more than $1.5 million!

This is an incredible achievement and would allow this person to actually live far better than she has in the past. In Part II, I will give the opposite example and present ways to avoid getting trapped. Please contact me if you have specific questions.