Building Wealth - Cutting Costs

OK, I want to be clear on this one, I mean you really need to read this book whether you are a salesman or not. I just finished reviewing it and I think it can help anyone that wants more out of life in the way of wealth and simply in the way of happiness. This book was authored by award winning salesmen and entrepreneurs Neil Franklin and Jack Spirko.

They call the book, the definitive book on how to sell and I think they are spot on. It is just that they don’t just teach you how to sell in regard to product as a professional sales person, they also teach you the philosopy of effectively selling yourselves in all walks of life. Here is one of my favorite quotes from the book,

“Deep inside you exists another person. That person has the knowledge, expertise, experience, and wisdom to guide you throughout your life. It’s the real you. We use the term real because most of us live our lives as actors, fulfilling various life roles as we have been conditioned to do so since leaving the innocence of childhood“

This book is indeed deep and even a tiny bit spiritual but it is actually very easy to read and understand. I am going to read it again because like most books that are really deep you get more each time you read through it. Here is another quote that might make that a bit more clear,

“As the child matures, the programming by parents and society continues. Now this young adult has to get admitted into a competitive university, get his first job, or possibly ask for a raise if underpaid. The sad part is that at age five, he would have known exactly what to do and would have asked fearlessly.”

Again I highly recommend you have a look at picking up a copy of this book, it is one I can honestly say is worth far more then the cost. Spend just a bit of time learning to adapt some of these principals to your life and indeed the return of investment will be huge. You can even preview and read the first 12 pages of the book at this link.

~ Cost Cutter

Well not completely but on some levels it appears to be so. Let’s take a trip back to grade school and remember what we were taught about Native Americans or “American Indians” (though some consider that term politically incorrect). The short answer was that the Americas were sparsely populated with many tribes and they where not a very advanced civilization. This is just yet another example of our school system teaching dogma rather then facts, and you would think liberals would be all over this one?

The reality is when Europeans first came to the Americas they were heavily populated and very advanced in many ways. Recent archaeological evidence is that both continents were heavily settled and the Indians, in both North and South America, had, for millennia, shaped the land to fit their needs and desires. This includes even the rain forest that lies in Amazonia. It was the diseases that the first visitors that decimated the populations and left them in the sparse state that we pushed onto reservations a few centuries later.

Despite this they may have had more to do with our Constitution then the Magna Carta or Greek Influence and by a large margin. Apparently people known as the Haudenosaunee (ho-dee-no-SHO-nee) or Iroquois as we leaned to call them in school and were made up of six tribes that inhabitated the area in and around today’s upstate New York had a “Great Law of Peace” that specified among other things,

• A council would rule the tribes and their business between each other but power was granted to the council and could be with drawn and the council only made decisions on external matters like peace treaties
• The council had no power over the inner functions of tribes
• The council could not declare war with out a referendum from the people
• Every man was considered free and would never subject himself to the will of any other man

Does this sound familiar? It should and in fact one of the biggest issues that Europeans had with American Indians is that they had no respect for any “class structure”, they believed no man was better then any other man simply due to a birth right, possessed wealth or title. For this they were both feared and despised. Much of the revolutionary idealism that spawned the American Revolution came directly from colonists interaction with Native Americans.

This is yet another sacrifice that went into creating what was once the most free nation on the planet. Today many of the constitutional freedoms our founders died and risked all for are either gone or may soon be.

To learn more about these true roots of America’s freedom I recommend the book - 1491, - New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus - by Charles C. Mann.

OK the other day I made a series of predictions on the New Hampshire primary in my what are you doing in 2008 post. Some I got right, some I got very wrong. Lets review….

Republican side

1. Rudy does awful and everyone says it doesn’t matter. - Got it dead on!

2. John McCain wins and his national numbers rock because people are lemmings. - Got it dead on!

3. Mitt Romney does OK and comes in second and they say it is over for him. - Got it sort of, Romney did come in 2nd but the media has held off saying his campaign is over. - Where I went wrong, the republican base stayed with Romney in New Hampshire and only a 4 to 1 break for McCain in independents that voted republican gave McCain the victory. I am not sorry about being wrong here, Romney to me is a much better choice then McCain.

4. Ron Paul does far better then the 8% the polls say he can expect. Comes in third and gets ignored again. - I was wrong he got almost exactly 8% which still put him right in the mix with the other candidates but he did not do as well as I predicted. He did however, largely get ignored by everyone but Fox News. Why? Backlash for the debate the excluded Ron from! Where did I go wrong? I gave the concept of freedom in the minds of New Hampshire voters to much credit. Honestly this concerns me for our nation.

There were really 6 predictions there I got 4 of 6. Not all that bad and I don’t pretend to understand New Hampshire primary voters.

On the Democrat Side

1. Barock wins by 10% - Wrong and the rest of my predictions hinged upon this. Barock lost, I was wrong.

2. Hillary gets slammed and the media runs to her defense. - Wrong, clearly missing number one blew this for me. This is another place I am happy to be wrong. I don’t want Hillary but I think she is easier to be for any republican and her economics while disastrous for the U.S. economy are still better then Obama’s.

3. Edwards does ok in 3rd but the media talks about how that is “hope for his campaign” even though there are only four Democrats in the race. Idiots. - Got it spot on but this was no real big prediction.

4. Bill Richardson gets a clue and drops out. - Another easy one and Bill is “making an announcement at a press conference today”, wanna guess what he is going to be saying.

So how did I blow it so bad expecting Obama to slam Hillary? I commited a cardinal sin and believed the polls with out knowing more about the landscape of democrats and democrat voting independents in New Hampshire. I must admit I am not strong when it comes to understanding how liberals think, like Michael Savage I believe, “liberalism is a mental disorder”.

Well South Carolina is the next place everyone will really be looking at. On the Democrats I am not ready to pick a winner but I do think it is do or die for Edwards. On the republican side look for a shoot out between Mike Hukabee and Fred Thompson. I will make some predictions and go on the line with them in another few days.

Here is the most painless way I know to cut your spending effectively. For the next 30 days just write down every dime you spend, every bill, etc should be in your check book already but write those down anyway too. Get a simple note book and record every single dime, read it every night before bed and just keep going. Write your required spending (bills you have to pay, light, heat, mortgage/rent, cable, weekly groceries, etc.) in one section of the book and all other expenditures in another section.

Don’t judge yourself much just record every penny. I mean if you give the kid a quarter for a gum machine write it down. That coffee at Starbucks, that bag of candy, what ever just record it. Do this religiously for 30 days, don’t cheat trust me you will benefit from this simple action.

Now try something I think might shock you. Take just the expenditures on things other then required bills and total them for each week. Make a graph of your weekly spend over 4 weeks. Odds are you will spend a lot less in week 4 then you did in week one. Remember no one told you to spend less, told you what to cut your spending on etc.

The simple act of being aware of what you spend, where and how you spend it will connect with your inner common sense. We all waste money, hell I do it! The key is to waste it consciously not unconsciously. Choose your play don’t just spend until it is gone.

Those of you who make middle to upper incomes will benefit the most with this technique. In fact the more you make the more you need to do this. This was the technique I used to reel myself back in as I went up in income. The more you have the more you tend to blow as you get to a point where you can pay all your bills easily and have good investments going on you get very complacent with what is left.

No matter your income be it 20K a year or 200K a year I challenge you to give this record keeping a try, most will be very shocked and pleased with the results over 30, 60 and 90 days. If you don’t do this all the time whenever you start to blow to much money, use it as a tune up. Remember you are your own boss and you need to be kicking your own ass once in a while.