Supporting Roles in Your Success

Last week, I shared with you some great advice from an old publication of mine, The Financial Freedom Report. I quoted from an article published in the Summer of 1995 entitled “Ask Your Barber How to Cut Hair, Not How to Make Money” which was simply saying that people who aren’t a super success as making money are not the people you want to talk to. However, there are some people you will need on the sidelines, but like knowing who to go to for advice on money, know who to go for advice on the other things you’ll need along the way, and when to bring them in.

Generally speaking, I find from experience, attorneys are deal breakers, not deal makers. Knowing that, I usually structure the whole deal before I have an attorney get involved at all. Yes, I want him or her involved. When? Just before I sign the papers. I want the attorney to read the contract to a make sure that everything is legal.

Problems can arise when the attorney steps into a management role. When going to an attorney for legal advice, you should always be sure that you ask very precise questions and not let the attorney overstep his bounds. He will if you let him. He has to play the devil’s advocate, and that is good. The same applies to your CPA, your business managers, and your bankers.

A man by the name of Owen Feltham said, “The greatest results in life are usually attained by simple means and the exercise of ordinary qualities. These may for the most part be summed up in these two words “common sense.”

So what is the bottom line from these words written so long ago? Use common sense when choosing who to go to for advice as well as what advice you take from people, even if they are “professionals” because if the advice doesn’t have anything to do with their profession, your common sense meter should be telling you to set that advice aside and have a word or two with someone that really knows what they are talking about in those matters.

Next week, just a bit more from my old publication but this time we’ll talk about common sense deals and how to avoid getting taken by fast talkers and their so-called ‘advice’.

Surround Yourself with Makers

I happen to pick up an old copy of a publication that I produced for many years called The Financial Freedom Report. It was dated the Summer of 1995 and the article that caught my eye was “Ask Your Barber How to Cut Hair, Not How to Make Money”. I quickly reread what had written all those years ago about that statement and it’s something that needs to be repeated and practiced today. Here’s what I said.

It is amazing how many people seek or listen to financial advice from neighbors who are in approximately the same financial position as themselves. Others run to their bankers to ask if a particular deal is any good or not. What do bankers know about deals? Zip! Sure, a banker knows about loans and checking accounts, and they know a lot about accounting and borrowing and lending money because that is their business. Deals are not. Since people know that there is money in banks, they tend to think that the bankers know how to earn it. Remember they are just custodians; they are just janitors of money. It’s not their own money. It’s yours.

Barbers work on heads, but that doesn’t make them psychologists, because they only work on the outside of the head, so their psychological advice or advice on how to make money is not very credible. Avoid the trap of looking to the wrong outside sources by doing some of your own thinking.

The best way to learn how to make money is with somebody who has made a lot of it. What better place to go than to an entrepreneur who started from scratch and did it all themselves? I wouldn’t even want to go to David Rockefeller. Sure, he has several hundred million dollars and he is the chairman of the board of one of the largest banks in the world, but his grandfather, John D. Rockefeller was the one who made the big bucks.

Everybody needs advisers, but the advisers you need to surround yourself with should be deal makers, not breakers. Sure, you and only you should be the one making the final decisions, but I find that all of us can be influenced and helped by smart people whose opinions we hold in high regard.

Next week, I’ll reveal a bit more about the subject with more from this very same article. Although it was written over 2 decades ago, the ideas in it are still true today. The best ideas do stand up over time!

Money Can’t Buy Happiness—or Can it?

We’ve all heard the old saying “money can’t buy happiness”, but like many enduring myths, this one is proving not to be true.  Harvard business professor Michael Norton says that money can and does, in fact, buy happiness in many cases.  And quite frankly my personal experience has proved his point over and over again. But really, it’s what you spend the money on that determines if that money actually brings you happiness.

As we’ve just finished the giving of ‘thanks’ on Thanksgiving Day and as we approach Christmas time and the possible gifts we can pass on to others, it’s a good idea to really think through what possible gifts would bring the most lasting happiness and satisfaction. I don’t think giving just ‘stuff’ is the answer as I think professor Norton proves.

Many years ago, I figured this ‘money myth’ really was just that—a myth. I learned it during those years when my family traveled the world. We went everywhere in Europe and had some very interesting and thrilling drives in the family station wagon through the middle eastern countries of Turkey, Syria, Jordon, Lebanon and Egypt. Later in life I even did a ’round the world’ trip. I have often found myself thinking over the grand memories of these wonderful excursions and when I compared the money spent on travel with money spent on a big screen TV or a new fancy car, the experience of the travel won every time.

Discovering that money really can buy happiness was a huge wake up call for me and motivated me in my younger years to figure out the secrets of making millions so I could really lift my happiness level and keep it up there at a high level most of the time.

When it comes to bringing lasting happiness, Professor Norton’s studies show that experience trumps the acquisition of ‘stuff’ almost all the time. That includes all kinds travel and vacations as well as a trip to the beach, mountains or an amusement park with a ride on the roller coaster.

Think about your own life and experiences.  If you are like me, you get tons of pleasure for several days even before you go on your exotic trip simply by thinking about the great things you may encounter and experience. Then you get more happiness and fulfillment during the trip or vacation.  As an extra bonus after you return home, you often live and relive that trip over and over again, sometimes for many, many years after. Compare that with how you think about the ‘stuff’ you have.  The newness of things quickly wears out and doesn’t thrill you much after a short while.

So again, think about the gifts that you may give this Christmas and maybe throw in a plane ticket or two for you kids or grandkids to some place they’ve never been. And yes, keep on earning and investing wisely to build your estate, without guilt, and give others experience rather than just stuff.

The 66 Day Habit

I thought that changing the habit of driving on the right side of the road to the left side as I did recently in Ireland was a tough habit to change. Well, believe it or not driving my new car here in America is proving to be just about as hard. Ok, I can hear you asking, how can driving a new car on the right side of the road in the country you grew up in require a person to form a new habit?  Well, the car is different from every car I’ve ever had. It’s a Tesla and it can operate almost completely on its own. So why would that require a change of habit? Because all of us are in the habit of controlling our car and it’s counter-intuitive to turn that power over to the car and its computer.

Especially if you are traveling at 80 miles an hour on the freeway in traffic and going around curves.

I’ve had the Tesla for a little over a month and I am still working on shifting my usual driving habits. I remember reading many years ago that changing or developing a new habit takes 21 days. I think I read that in an old classic book by Maxwell Maltz, Psycho Cybernetics. So here it’s been over a month and I’m still trying to relax and let the car take over.

I began to question the 21-day thing and found out that was a bit of a myth started by Maltz all those years ago. A more recent study done by Phillippa Lally, a health psychologist at University college London, studied 96 people as they tried to change a habit. Her research showed that a change in habit or developing a totally new habit takes a little over 2 months–66 days to be more accurate. This is a very good thing to know because our habits, good and bad, really make or break our entire lives and if we held on to the 21-day myth we could easily become disappointed when we failed to change or develop a habit after 3 weeks. This could cause us to give up.

When I look at my own life with its big ups and downs I can’t help but see where some bad habits have held me back, causing me pain and failure. But then again, when I look at the good habits I have, I can see why it was such a good thing that I worked hard to form them. My dad for example, pushed and pushed me to form the habit of reading good books, which I finally did. I also pushed myself to develop the habit of working out, running, walking a ton and playing tennis virtually every single day and now at almost age 72 I am seeing the huge benefit of this habit and it’s not even hard to do anymore.

I also have to attribute my wealth to forming some very powerful and productive financial habits that have served me so well. Some are very simple, like saving at least 10% of every bit of income, which I did even when I was poor and making only $600 a month. Early on I also formed the habit of reading every financial book I could get my hands on as well as investing every penny I could into wise investments.

So I would plead with you to look at yourself and your habits and make a list of both your good and bad habits noting how the good ones serve and the bad ones aggravate your life and your family. Determine to keep up with the good ones but also add new habits and to change the bad ones. Stick with each new or changed habit for at least 66 days and watch the results! Try also to get your kids, significant other, parents and friends to do the same thing. I pretty sure you won’t be sorry.

A well ingrained habit is second nature and we will do it automatically, even those things we don’t enjoy doing all that much. The thing is, we love the results and if you keep your eye on what good habits can do for you, you can do it 66 times and beyond.

 

 

Employing the AB Split

Yesterday I sat down with a young man who asked for a little mentoring from me.  He had started writing a novel and wanted some coaching as to how he could get a publisher and or a literary agent.  I explained to him, first of all, how tough it was to get a publisher.  There are over 200,000 new books published every year and probably 10 times that many books that try to get published but are turned down.  I told him how I eventually got my first book published and how that didn’t happen until I had sold several hundred thousand copies by myself. Of course, he wanted to know how I did that. What I told him is something that can help anyone to achieve great success with almost any venture they are interested in pursuing.

Many years ago one of my mentors introduced me to a very simple but very powerful method of marketing.  In simple terms it’s called an AB split—it’s an easy way to measure anything from what price is the best price to charge to what words in an advertisement, book title, product name or anything else will be the best to use to grab people’s attention.

You can test two prices in a newspaper ad, for instance, by spending just a few extra bucks to have one ad show a $25 price printed in half the newspapers, then list a $45 price in the other half of the print run.  After looking at the orders you receive, you will know which price your customers preferred by simply counting up the orders you received for each price listed. The same AB split can be used with snail mailings or internet marketing, radio, TV or phone solicitations. And that’s just the beginning.  You can test what title would be best for a new book, or the best headline for an advertisement or the best words and story to tell in the body copy of a lengthy ad.

When I couldn’t get a publisher to take on my first book I began using the AB split method and quickly and quite inexpensively found out that the “How to Wake up the Financial Genius Inside You” title of the book and the headline in my advertisements was far superior to the headline “How to Become a Millionaire”.  I then used the AB split to discover what price was best, using newspapers, mailings and TV ads.  Wow, once I found the best price and the best headlines and body copy to use, things went crazy as I began advertising just about everywhere, in newspapers, radio, TV and mass mailings.  The orders came rolling in by the thousands and eventually that money led me to publish a newsletter that morphed into a magazine with over 50,000 subscribers.  All of that, plus some, coming primarily from the use of the AB split method.

I don’t know what the young man who wants to be a big time novelist will do with what I told him but if he applies the AB concept to getting his book out there and sticks with it, I’m pretty sure he’ll soon see huge numbers for his book along with many lifetime rewards and a ton of satisfaction.

Forging Past the Fear

Well I did it! I gave my one-hour presentation to the MBA students at Utah State University on ‘How to Make Millions by Wise Investing’. If you recall from last week’s post, this speech had caused me some fear and anxiety. But after 5 or 10 minutes the fear and anxiety that had been gripping me diminished and finally totally disappeared. The students were great, as was the professor. They asked some great questions and it all went quite well. Yay! I guess I acted out the title of Susan Jeffers great little book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.

It’s fascinating to me that a huge percentage of people don’t step outside their comfort zone when it comes to investing as a direct result from that thing we know as fear. It might be fear of the unknown, fear of losing their money or sometimes just plain fear of taking any risks at all. I look back at my younger years (now called “my warrior years”) and remember how quite a few of my peers, people that were just as smart as me and sometimes a lot smarter, knew what I was doing and how I was doing it and, yes, knew that I was having some very big financial gains. However, they didn’t dare step up to do the same thing I was doing. I’m pretty sure the reason was primarily because of fear.

Looking back now I’m pretty sure I didn’t share with them that I had huge fears myself. The thing is, I forged ahead anyways and took the risks and it paid off. I wish I could go back in time and share those fears that I felt with those friends. I think if I had done that then many of those people might have taken a few more calculated risks, pushing past their fears and ending up with the kind of success that I experienced.

I think you would agree that many of our fears come from us thinking  things like “Oh, what if I fail? What will my friends and family think of me? What if I lose all my money?” But like I told the MBA’s, everyone fails from time to time! The key is to learn from your mistakes and be sure not to beat yourself up. It’s okay to fail. No human is immune to failure but if you pick yourself up and keep trying, your success, in investing to create your fortune or just about any part of your life, will far outweigh your failures.

Real Estate Investing: The Advantages Never Change

Yesterday I was going through a bunch of old files and I came across a large envelope that my good friend Joe Sugarman sent me. Joe is the founder of the company that introduced the Blueblocker sunglasses that sold millions, making Joe a very, very rich man. In the package was a few of my old ads that Joe had kept.  On the old yellowed paper I re-read one of my first half page ads printed in the Wall Street Journal on January 25, 1977. The headline read “How to Achieve Total Financial Freedom”.  I am totally convinced that the reason the ad sold so many copies of my first book, How to Wake Up the Financial Genius Inside You, had less to do with the semi-catchy headline than the sub-header that read, “Millionaires Are Not 100 Times Smarter Than You, They Just Know The Wealth Formula”. I’m sure that most people read that and it rang true to them. Because it is true.

In the body of the ad I went on to say, “Millionaires are not 100 or even 10 times smarter than you , but it is a fact that millionaires are making 10 to 50 or even 100 times more than you.” Additionally, I should consider that millionaires are not working 100 or even 20 times harder or longer than you either. There are not enough hours in the day to work 20 times longer than your average worker! And now, 38 years later, I can clearly see that the formula to making big money and accumulating great wealth is basically the same today as it was way back then.

I can tell you for sure that if I were just starting out now as a young man without any money to speak of, just like I was years ago, I would pursue the same path as I did back then.  The only difference would be that I might be a little more aggressive today than I was then. Today’s market is ripe for the picking!  For the most part the only push back that I have had in recent years from readers of the Financial Genius book is that buying properties at the prices given in the book are just not possible in today’s market.  And those critics are absolutely correct, but the ratios are still pretty much the same.  In other words today you can’t find “dirt bag” properties for prices like $40,000 or $50,000 in most markets. And that’s correct.  But the ratios for what you can make on your investment are still the same.

In many cases, you can gain a 33% value increase on a dirt bag property you fix up. On a $50,000 property, that would be a little more than $66,000. But today, you may have to pay $120,000 or $200,000 dollars for a beat up property but after fixing it up, you could sell the $120,000 purchase for at least $159,000 and the $200,000 investment for $266,000 or more. Yes, these numbers don’t take into account the money you spent on fixing it up, but if you leveraged the deal with a mortgage–using someone else’s money to make money–you will find that the return on your investment goes up a ton and will usually more than make up for your fix up expenses.  So bottom line here is don’t get hung up on the lower price examples in the book, invest and pay attention to the percentages you can gain.

To help with that, I have recently updated my Financial Genius book. It will be going to the printer before too long and I will let you know here when it’s ready for ordering.

The Failing of Stock Market Investments: Human Nature

In last week’s blog I talked about the wild stock market moves and the huge sell off, which was followed quickly by a rebound of prices. Since then we’ve had another pull back of prices once again erasing some of the gains. Some people would point to the big spring back of prices and make the argument against my conclusion that for most people investing in ‘real estate’ is a much better place for their money.

It is true that, in most cases, the market does rebound and in the long run you can make some money there as long as you buy good growing companies. The key here, as Warren Buffett has preached for years, is to buy the right stocks and hold them for the very long term. The big problem, however, is most people don’t do that. Why? It seems to be connected to our human nature. You see, when many, if not most, people buy a stock and they see it gain, say 50%, they sell it because, as I heard hundreds of times when I was a stock broker, “Hey, you can’t go broke taking a profit!” But the thing is, that stock may end up being the next Microsoft or Apple Computer company, subsequently moving up another 50% or 100% or 1000% or more over time.

On the other side, there’s the typical part time stock investor who buys a stock at $20 only to watch it drop to $10 a share, says to themselves, “I am not going to take a loss on this so I won’t sell it now.” So they hold on and wait. Over time I think you can guess what will happen. Yep, those kind of investors end up with a portfolio full of crummy, terrible, loser stocks. They kept the ones that went down and sold the ones that went up.

A big part of the problem with stocks is anyone can quickly and easily buy or sell with very little effort and that can lead to impulsive decisions. Greed and fear can cause that quick buying and selling of stock reaction–usually not a good idea. However with income producing real estate, impulse buying or selling doesn’t usually happen since it all takes more time and, of course, more effort.

But because of that ‘time and effort’ factor, most people that buy income producing properties buy and hold for the long term and if they’ve done it even half right they are collecting enough income in rents to more than cover their expenses which gives them the great benefit of being able to wait–sometimes for a very long time–until they can sell the property for a sizable gain! That’s why I love real estate.  It is also what primarily got me to leave the stock business and move into the real estate investing business. I do hope if you are not already investing in real estate, you’ll start very soon.

A Case for Diversification

Wow! What a wild stock market we’ve had the last few days. Over a trillion dollars in lost value. Can you imagine having virtually all your asset held in stocks? I was asked the other night at a party, by a person that apparently was hurt pretty badly by this, how much money this huge sell off of stocks cost me. I answered that it had virtually no impact on my assets and or net worth. How is this possible? Well, it’s simple … I own just one small position in one publicly traded stock. Maybe in the long run the market drop will have an effect on real estate property values–that’s where I have almost all my net worth– but I very much doubt it.

Yes, I used to be a stock broker many, many years ago and would buy and sell stock for myself frequently, but I learned the hard way that even very smart people can lose money very quickly in the stock market. Even if you buy great stocks and those companies are making money and doing well, if the overall market takes a big hit like it has done the last few days, your good strong company stock usually goes down with the market. One of the big reasons I moved almost all my assets into improved, rent generating real estate is because I had a least some control over the asset that I owned. You see, with stocks, you not only don’t control the company or the people that are running the company, but you have no control over what the overall stock market is doing.

You may be thinking, “Okay, I agree with all that but putting my money in improved real estate takes a lot of work and effort.” And you would be correct. It does take work but the rewards can be so great and much of the work can be turned over to others. I’ve certainly found that to be true and the huge surprise and benefit to me was that I found people that do a better job finding, fixing and managing the properties than I do, or I should say “did”. I’m a big time delegator now.

At a minimum, I would encourage you and anyone that will listen to not put all your eggs in that one ‘stock basket’. Diversity is the smart thing to do and, yes, even though I own very little stock, I do make sure I diversify my asset by owning different kinds of real estate. I own everything from triple net lease buildings with national company tenants to development of storage units to small retail strip malls and even a bit of raw land. A bit of cash always being set aside is a good idea too.

I encourage you to take time to plan out your asset strategy. Don’t be like the majority of Americans who seem to spend a lot more time planning their vacation that they do planning the financial life!

 

 

The Risk and Reward of Living Large

Mitt Romney, former GOP candidate for President recently made some powerful comments to graduating students at Utah Valley University. He advised the students “to experience a fulfilling, purposeful life. One thing you’re going to have to do is live a ‘Large Life’”. What great advice. That is something all of us need to pay attention to. We need to go out and do it and do it our entire lives.  So many times we hesitate to ‘Live Large’. Why? Because most of the time we fear that we will fail.

“Failures don’t have to define who you are,” Romney had gone on to say, and of course we all have had failures.  He further stated, “Through all my occupations, I have experienced successes and failures. I am asked what it felt like to lose to President Obama. Well, not as good as winning. Failures aren’t fun, but they are inevitable.”

How about you, the reader?  Have you racked up a lot of failures or just a few?  It seems to me, from my experience, that the number of failures I’ve had is in direct proportion to how large I’ve tried to live.  So, yes, I’ve had a ton of failures but some of those have led to some huge successes. And the reason for those successes was that I learned so much from my failures.

I remember one huge loss that I learned a valuable lesson from which lead me to some very, very large successes.  What happened was I decided to lend a large amount of money with a restaurant as collateral.  Big mistake on my part! Why? Because I don’t know much about that kind of business so if it failed I certainly wouldn’t know how to run it. And guess what? It did fail and I lost almost all of what I had loaned.

What did I learn?  Well first I found out that restaurants have a very high rate of failure and second, I learned that I shouldn’t stray from what I know best.  Not that I shouldn’t ever loan money but if I do, I should loan it on assets that I understand as well as being on improved real estate which, ideally, would also be income producing.

I forged ahead and made many millions of dollars’ worth of loans that were backed up by real estate and was very successful.  Later I discovered that I could do even better by owning the right kind of income producing properties. I also, very successfully ventured into the development of condos and warehouses, where the profits were even bigger although they did come with increased risks but in that case, those were risks I was willing to take.  And much, if not most of that success, came from lessons learned from my failures and my trying to ‘Live Large’.

Next week, I want to address something else Mitt Romney said at Utah Valley: “Your life will be larger if you value and nourish friendships.”  Those are also some very poignant words.

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