Your Compass In The Fog Of Overwhelm

Nicola here from The Money Gym,writing to you on 1st January 2010 with my third very important message….

Think about this for a second………..

In the olden days, humans were able to find their way around the globe, in any kind of weather, even if the fog was so bad they were unable to see a few feet in front of themselves….

How did they do that?

http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/silverelite

They were able to find their way forward because they had some deceptively simple tools…

Tools that were simple to use but were so sophisticated that they delivered exceptional results every time…results you could depend on…

Those tools were….

The Stars and a Compass.

Yep, that’s pretty much all they used to sail ships across the vast oceans, to go somewhere so far away it literally took months, if not years to get there and then to come safely home again.

Would it surprise you to discover that there are some deceptively simple tools you can use too, to navigate your way through all the financial confusion you might be experiencing right now?

Well, no!  I’m not going to tell you about those tools, I’m going to show you….how to create and use them yourself.

http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/silverelite
Warm regards

Nicola, Judith & The Money Gym Team

P.S.      Watch our brand new video to discover some of the simple but effective tools we use to navigate our way around our financial world!

http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/silverelite

Have You Taken Up Residence On Your Couch For December?

Sitting on my couch, among my new set of cushions, reflecting on 2009 and thinking ahead to 2010, I’m struck by how certain times of year lend themselves particularly to this kind of introspective thinking.

Easter, with the promise of spring and new life, September with the start of the new school year (and even us grownups still remember that feeling!) and of course Christmas with the impending New Year.

Funny old days, in early December, are they not?   It’s very, very dark, at both ends of the day, and recently it’s felt like it’s never going to stop raining.  One can hardly remember the sun or the sunny days of Summer and it seems an awfully long way off to next summer, that’s for sure!  The couch seems the best place to be, with Strictly or X-Factor on the TV and the heating on full.

The New Year is coming quicker than lightning but all we want to do is wind down to Christmas!

On the one hand some of the country go into a spending spree and Christmas decorating spasm, and on the other hand, some people are quietly emailing tales of woe, stories of quiet desperation and harsh self-criticism about another year gone by – wasted!  Months of procrastination, prevarication leading to …………….absolutely no results.

Do you secretly feel really cross because your 2009 has not progressed you to where you want to be, financially?  Perhaps you have been one of the pension holders or property investors affected by the credit crunch in some way or other and you rather hopefully had all your eggs in one basket?

Read more..

Shocking Truth About Judith’s Money | What Will Be YOUR “Return On Investment”?

Judith Morgan says: Nicola’s always asking me “Why won’t our clients tell us PRECISELY how much more money they have made by being in The Money Gym?”

I don’t know is the short answer!   What I do know is that in the UK we don’t like talking about money whether it’s because we’ve made less than we would like (and don’t want to share that) OR the more likely Money Gym scenario which is that we’ve made more than we think our friends and family would like (and we don’t want them to know or to show them up).

Many’s the time when we have been contacted by a particularly successful client and asked to TAKE DOWN a testimonial, because they are getting divorced, have just met someone new, don’t want to be stalked, are worried about burglars, don’t want the tax man to have any inkling….many, many differnent reasons.

This, of course, makes our Money Gym marketing very difficult, particularly for the Gold and Boardroom coaching programmes and it makes it hard to give people specific examples when they ask that age old question “How quickly will I get a return on my investment and how much will that be?”

Read more..

Financial Freedom | John’s Burning Question

Hi Nicola

Here’s my burning question…..I am a man. 50 years old. Anyway, I would like to ask for your advice regarding my route to the wealth highway.

My financial position is thus. Home owner with no mortgage. Our home is worth around £155,000 in today’s market. My wife owns a 1 bedroom house with her sister a 50/50 share mortgage  around £70,000 and valued at say £90,000. The property is let and only just pays for itself.

My wife and I both work with approx take home pay per month of £2250. I require around £100 a week to live on and my wife requires all of her income to live, so I can save around £750 per month.

I have a credit card of around £2000, savings of £3000 and my wife has a loan of £3000. I hate my job and would love to be free of it.

My interest is web design and am becoming quite good. Hopefully this is where I can shine but I need more free time for this to happen. I am knackered at the end of the day.

I realise that my wife and I are in a good position regarding our own home and we could maybe do something with the equity, I don’t know.

What would you do, Nicola?

Hi there John…congratulations on being our first “Ask Nicola” burning questioner! And what a lovely one to start with……the quick answer is that you are financially free already, you just don’t know it!

I’m going to mainly deal with your own situation here as your wife and you seem to keep your finances quite seperate…is that right?  Do come back to me if you wanted a response bases on your joint finances….

You say that you would like to do more web design, and with some good marketing online, and networking locally, and I know that you could make a very good living at this.  Local business people are AT LAST waking up to the power of the web in generating leads for their business, and how efficient and cheap that can be compared with the traditional methods, like advertising.  They are happy to pay £500 – £1000 for a blog type site (great for SEO), and around £2000 – £3000 for a blog type site, with ecommerce / mailiing list capabilities.

You could educate yourself about internet marketing, including traffic generation, social networking and web 2.0, as well as web design (our about to be relaunched Internet Marketing Home Study System will soon be available via our very affordable Silver membership) and then you would REALLY be in demand.  I would envisage that, within a year, you would be outsourcing most of the work!

However, the issue seems to be time and energy, as your day job takes both.  Have you considered taking some of the equity in your house, and investing it in your new business, using it to

a) pay yourself a salary of £500 a month (£100 per week x 52 divided by 12)

b) pay for some teaching to bring your internet marketing / seo skills up to scratch – Silver would cover that

c) pay for a year’s worth of mentoring – our Money Gym Gold programme would be ideal for this and I would suggest you have a look at our coaches, and see which one you think would best be able to hold your hand through the year, to set up and build your business.

I would think pulling out £20,000 would not only cover the expenses as above, but also pay the payments on the money you would be borrowing so your outgoings would not go up at all.  If you apply before you hand your notice in, you should have no trouble getting a mortgage of 12% loan to value.

Your other alternative – if you don’t want to use your equity, is to use your £750 a month savings, to build a “Freedom Fund” to cover your first year in business, and in Money Gym Silver membership, we give you a blueprint on how to do that, step by step.

HOWEVER, if I were you, I would be pulling out all the equity available, and as well as investing in my new business, as above, I would be buying as many one bedroom buy to let flats (existing housing stock NOT new builds) as humanly possible.

This would ensure that you never had to work again, if you didn’t want to!  You could keep leveraging the growth in your property portfolio, again and again, tax free, to grow your portfolio further and to live off.

Again, this is something our experienced property investing Money Gym coaches could hold your hand through, via the Money Gym Gold programme as they are all very sound on this topic!!

Now, you know what you can do (and what I would do) the only question is “what’s going to stop you doing it?”

Keep in touch John and let me know how you get on?

Warm regards

Nicola

Find Your Finance Cornerstone

(This article is reproduced with kind permission of Mike Southon, international business speaker, weekly columnist for the Financial Times, entrepreneur mentor and co-author with Chris West of “The Beermat Entrepreneur” series of books).

Mike Southon says:  This is my column that will feature in Saturday’s Financial Times, which can be found in the entrepreneurship pages of the Money section. You can also find my columns on the FT web site here )

One of the symptoms of a credit crunch moving seamlessly into a recession is the unfortunate chore of the entrepreneur spending more time with their bank manager.

This might well be to obtain more credit to cope with a short-term cash-flow problem, or to explain the restructuring required to take best advantage of unpredictable market conditions. Whatever the desired outcome, this is unlikely to be a meeting which either party regards with keen anticipation.

The challenge is that the entrepreneur and the bank manager speak two completely different languages. The entrepreneur likes to talk about new ideas and opportunities, about changing the world and making a difference and being recognised in the street. The bank manager is probably under strict instructions from above to reduce the risk in their portfolio of accounts, and can only express this in the language of the spreadsheet and the bottom line.

Meetings between entrepreneurs and banks managers can be tense and sometimes even characterised by strong language. Many years ago in my first start-up our CEO went to open a bank account. He was back very quickly and in a bad mood, so we realised the meeting had not gone well.

In his view, the bank manager was an idiot; he had not understood how clever our CEO was, how we clearly had an unbeatable business proposition and how much money we all were all going to make, including the bank.

Our CEO was ultimately right about this. We did indeed sell the company for a lot of money only five years later. But back on day one we had a small problem; we did not even have a bank account yet.

Understanding finance is one of the toughest challenges for an entrepreneur, especially if they come from a sales or technical background. It is a very large topic with constantly changing rules, and it was a real challenge for Chris West to summarise this into simple terms in Finance on a Beermat.

West worked with finance experts Stephen King and Jeff Macklin, and while there are indeed chapters on double-entry bookkeeping and tax, the book starts with simple and straightforward advice: before you do anything, you should find yourself a Finance Cornerstone.

This is very unlikely to be a full-time employee from day one; most people have a ‘virtual’ Finance Cornerstone, someone who comes perhaps one day a month and puts some order to your receipts and invoices in preparation for submitting your accounts.

But we make an important distinction between an accountant and a Finance Cornerstone.

An accountant is essentially reactive; they will do your books and then tell you that you have gone broke. A Finance Cornerstone is pro-active; they tell you in advance that unless you do certain things, you will go broke at some time in the future.

Even if they only come in one day a month, they understand your business and can advise on how to scale up your business when times are good, and how to scale down your business when they are not.

Most importantly, they speak the language of the bank manager, and should always accompany you to any such meetings. The entrepreneur should make some introductory remarks, and then leave the running of the meeting to the Finance Cornerstone. In particular, any promises made about the provision of security or repayment of loans should be made by someone who not only understands the mindset of the bank manager, but who is also more likely to be trusted to keep those promises.

And if circumstances change and repayment terms need to be negotiated, this is best done by a professional, who will present a case that is based on facts rather than emotions. After all, the bank is in the business of lending money with interest, so as long as they think you will not let them down, they are more likely to be sympathetic to your cause.

In my first start-up we were lucky that another of our shareholders, the CEO’s brother, was a vice-president of Goldman Sachs, and thus able to smooth things over with the bank. If you are not in this happy situation, then I recommend one of the organisations that provide virtual Finance Cornerstones, such as King and Macklin’s company FDUK.

Alternatively, you can even ask your bank manager to recommend someone. I am sure they will be delighted to help.

Finance on a Beermat by Chris West, Stephen King and Jeff Macklin is published by Random House Business Books.

Finance on a Beermat (Second edition):
http://tinyurl.com/6jlpxj