Lois Holmlund - It's Never Too Late

Life is funny. It’s almost like one minute you’re out partying, going to university, starting out in a career, getting married, and the next you find you are over 50 and alone. My husband died suddenly ten years ago, leaving me nothing but thousands of dollars of debt, and I worked hard to pay it all off. So now I’m 52, debt free, with a small pension waiting for me when I turn 65, but that’s it. No savings, no real estate or investments, and a big question mark as to what’s ahead.

I’ve always been very careful with my money. “Cash Flow” for me meant going on-line to make sure my paycheque went in, then anxiously watch the balance dwindle all month as I struggled to keep enough there to pay my rent. One unexpected bill would knock over my carefully stacked house of cards. “Investing” was making the decision whether or not to get a good winter coat, or try to get the current one to last another year. “Stocks” were what you put in soup.

When you’re alone in the world, as are 47% of women over fifty, and you have no husband or children to “take care of you”, you also have no one to share expenses with, and no one to help tide you over if that pension isn’t going to be there for you. You watch your rent go up and up each month, while your paycheque stays much the same, and you wonder what you’re going to do in ten years when you retire and your income is cut in half.

I read on the Internet that “the average female born between 1948 and 1964 may likely remain in the work force until at least 74 years of age due to inadequate financial savings and pension coverage.” And that 58% of female baby boomers have less than $10,000 in retirement. With my sum total of $1,500 in RRSPs, I fit right in.

But I don’t want to work until I’m 74! I don’t even want to work until I’m 64. Or 55.

Sound bleak?

I thought so. That is, until I went to a group called Infiniti Point, whose mandate it is “To Educate, To Serve, To Profit Together.” With their encouragement, I tackled my first financial book: “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki. While I expected to be overwhelmed with a lot of words I didn’t know and concepts I didn’t understand, instead everything was clearly laid out and I found myself for the first time in a long time thinking . . . hey, maybe I can do this.

EDUCATE YOURSELF
Going with the idea that it is fundamentally untrue that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks, I began to show up at weekly meetings in an attempt to teach this old dog something about investing, stocks, taxes, and lots of words I had never heard before. Even words that I thought I already knew, suddenly had different meanings, giving me a whole new set of ABC’s : Assets and Liabilities. Break Even Point. Cash Flow. Due diligence. Evaluation. Fundamentals. What at first was mind boggling, though, gradually began to sort itself out as I came to understand each individual concept. Maybe not baby steps, but one arthritic step after the other still gets you there!

SATURDAY MORNING GAMER
And I get to play games! Whodda thought? I’m not talking about bridge, either. There’s an amazing game played at Infiniti Point once a month called “Cash Flow 101” that teaches you financial literacy and freedom. Cost to play? Nothing. Value? Priceless. It challenges you to think outside the box, to balance your income and your expenses, and then create a cash flow out of passive income that you build to get yourself out of the Rat Race. I’ve always hated accounting and working with numbers, but this was different. It was exciting. Motivating! And best of all – I could do it!

IT’S NEVER TOO LATE
I admit, I think I’m the oldest one there at the meetings. I was expecting to feel like the odd one out – after all, instead of expensive hair highlights, I have grey-haired roots – but instead I’ve felt included, encouraged, and challenged. I’ve even started bringing my friends—women, like me, who are ready to take those first steps in bringing about financial freedom. To be honest, we’re not looking to become billionaires or start multi-national business franchises. We have no one to pass on our potential vast fortunes.

We are at the end of working careers and all we want is to be able to retire and not worry about our finances. And the good news is: It’s not too late!

~~

written by Lois Holmlund

Chris Kennedy - Book Report: Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki

I Should Be Mad As Hell At You, Robert!

Over $10,000 and one entire year of my life later, I still haven’t bought a single property with “no money down.” By right I should be mad as hell at Robert Allen for selling me (and others) a pipe dream. But ultimately, whose responsibility is it that I didn't become a model success story. So, instead, I put my concentration towards the eerie, hollow sound the wind makes when it blows through my empty wallet. After all, I take responsibility for failing to make Robert’s no money down technique work for me.

For those who don’t know Robert Allen, he's Canadian born but a real estate guru in the states whose claim to fame came from a simple dare: "Send me to any city in the United States. Take away my wallet. Give me $100 for living expenses. And in 72 hours I will buy an excellent piece of real estate using none of my own money."

Robert got media clout when The LA Times took up his bold challenge and sent him to San Francisco, to prove himself with a reporter in tow to document his every deal. 57 hours later Robert had 7 properties in his portfolio worth $772,000. Can you say instant fame, instant publishing deals and a soap box from which to shout at people like me – “you too can do it, pay here, and here, and here!”

The only reason to mention Robert A really is that while attending one of his seminars in 2007, someone dropped the name Robert Kiyosaki on me. Had I been angry or feeling sorry for my situation at the time I wouldn’t have wanted to hear anything about real estate experts and I wouldn't have taken any action to buy another book.

So, still wide-eyed and eager to learn and obviously open to further humiliation, I picked up a copy of Rich Dad Poor Dad for $25 and started reading. Robert’s writing style struck me as exceptionally pedestrian, very atypical of a book on finance and business. Concepts are intertwined with real-life stories that made the message easy to digest and apply to my own experiences, or lack of same. Usually, I like being challenged by an author but not so much when it comes to learning a subject I know little about. In this case simple was better. The poignant messages really hit home in the simple, honest and non insulting storytelling style. I read the entire book with a highlighter in one hand and a notebook and a pen next to me for instantly notes. Those notes came from almost every page as I read.

I was hearing things I had never heard before. They challenged conventions I thought were unshakable and exposed my lack of knowledge or in layman terms, ignorance. This was an alien philosophy but I wasn’t afraid of approaching and learning. I wanted to learn how to reach my own place of personal wealth. Ironic that I picked up nothing about buying real estate - even thought Robert Kiyosaki is himself a guru on the subject. What I got was far more powerful, Robert Kiyosaki didn’t dangle fish in front of me with bravado publicity stunts; instead, he was showing me the art of being the fisherman through simple examples of how he learned to fish. I’ve adopted his philosophy and I keep his words close as reminders and as inspiration. Here are just a few Kiyosaki-isms from Rich Dad Poor Dad.

• Fear and Desire: the Rat Race trap!


• A job is really a short-term solution to a long-term problem


• Broke is temporary, poor is eternal


• Don’t work for money, make money work for you


• Human life is a struggle between ignorance and illumination – once we stop searching for information and knowledge about ourselves, ignorance sets in. The struggle is moment to moment


• Learn to use your emotions to think, not think with your emotions


• Know the difference between an asset and a liability and buy assets


• To become financially secure, a person needs to mind their own business


• In the real world it’s often not the smart that get ahead but the bold


• Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn


• People who avoid failure also avoid success


• You are only one skill away from great wealth


• When it comes to making money the only work skill most people know is hard work


• For winners, losing inspires them. For losers, losing defeats them


• Don’t listen to poor or frightened people


• Be generous with what you have and the powers that be wil be generous to you


• Don’t take yourself so seriously

What I have learned from all of this is that the wind won’t be making that eerie, hollow sound as it blows into my wallet much longer because my wallet will be full of cash. Rich Dad Poor Dad was only an introduction to my education and to what is possible. I continue to learn from Robert Kiyosaki’s writings and from like minded people who play his Cashflow game.


Chris Kennedy

Earl Flormata - Evolution of an Asset

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. - 1st Corinthians 13:11

Unfortunately for many people, as children - their parents never learned the ways of money and instead were taught to be workers for those that knew the patterns of the rich.

This is one of the reasons why I run Cash Flow 101 game nights. Robert Kiyosaki has created a spectacular learning and teaching tool within the game that allows everyone from every level to learn and grow.

From T. Harv Eker’s book – Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, Harv mentions the three most dangerous words in the English Language – “I know already”. I know that I’m guilty of uttering that phrase myself, so from time to time I do check and challenge myself to live by the adage of C.A.N.E.I. – Constant and Never Ending Improvement.

In that vein – I present to you, my readers and peers – my new understanding of the word “asset”. In the beginning, I understood that an asset to be something that which you own.

Asset



The dictionary says: “property owned by a person or company” – which does back up my original understanding and thought process. The banks had also cemented this original thought process by asking me to list my assets prior to obtaining a loan. Their definition of an asset was also something that I owned of value.

Then I read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, and that changed my life. The word ASSET soon changed meaning for me into something that puts money in your pocket. It took awhile to break from the mindset of having a house as your single largest asset to one of our largest liabilities, but eventually the thought sank in and I was able to reach financial freedom.

Then things took a turn for the worse and a few of my investments collapsed and my income dropped drastically alongside of this. Luckily I was taken under the wing of an investment banking group that again changed my perception of the world at large.

My learning continued and soon I understood the requirements for a stock to graduate to a senior exchange. With this path of thought, the bankers taught me to really take a look at “collateral” and that if something wasn’t leveragable, then the amount of value that it brought to the table was limited to a single dimension and prone to failure.

So what’s my new definition of an asset?

It’s moved from that which you own to that which you can leverage, AND brings in multiple streams of income.