Losing, Loving, Laughing & Life!

It’s been a week at home, this week, settling back into school routine, getting used to the grey skies, trying to decide if I want to stay here and try and buy this house, or move into Shoreham or Brighton to something brighter and newer.  Feeling restless…..but happier than recently as it’s been sunnier in Shoreham.

We’ve been gearing up for the Money Gym “Really Useful Internet Day” on 10th October and I’ve been starting to plan the marketing campaign for that which will take place over the next four weeks and will hopefully fill the room.

Because even an event with a ticket price of £25, all of which we are donating to our favourite Money Gym charity “The Big Issue” (helping the homeless help themselves), takes a full on marketing campaign to ensure it’s success.

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Bonjour Mon Ami! Free Traffic Generation Seminar tickets – déplacer vos fesses rapidement!

Bonjour Mon Ami, Here’s something good but you have todéplacer vos fesses rapidement!

But first……did you know I have an Opera Singer sister?  Her name is Heather and I’m very proud of her.

So why am I telling you this?

And why am I testing my school girl French to the max?  Some might even say “painfully”.

Because my family loyalty was put to the test this week….Bigtime!

I had to choose between going to see singing sister Heather sing at the Paris Opera House in “Carmen”, one of my favourite operas of all time…..and going for a long weekend in Paris with Sarah……

OR…….

Going to see some of my very favourite people speak at what looks like one of the biggest and the best seminars of the year.

People like Alan Forrest Smith, Jennie Armato, Guy Levine (who taught me so much back in the day), Mark Vurnum and our very own Mark Anastasi.

O yes!

Since going to the “Break Free Seminar” recently, Mark has shot into my Top 10 Speakers list.

Worldwide.

Also featured at the Summit is a little known (so far) chap called Gareth Owen who taught me one little trick that has EXPLODED my Google Adwords results. Alan Forrest Smith says Gareth is his secret traffic weapon.

Well, I was chatting with Mark Anastasi the other day, as I want to interview him to find out some of his secrets, and he mentioned his upcoming Summit.

Oh, I was so disappointed not to be able to go!  But Heather and Sarah would never speak to me again if I cancelled this trip.

Mark was cool though and he did something very special for me, even though I can’t go.

Today Mark allocated me 20 tickets to “The Traffic Generation Summit” worth £97 each to GIVE AWAY to my clients.

(each ticket comes with £1,582.00 in bonuses, by the way)

He said, “Nicola, don’t worry, get some of your very favourite clients to come along, and I’m sure they will share everything they learn with you!”

The man’s a genius!

Of course you will.

So here goes with the info…..and remember, you have to share!

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Claim Your Ticket And Your Bonuses Here:
http://www.trafficgenerationsummit.com/moneygym
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Attend this special Wealth Creation seminar and discover…

* How To Produce a Steady Flow Of Buyers To Your Online Business And Break Free From The Rat Race

* How To Get a Tsunami of Traffic Through a Website To Take Over a Million Dollars

* How To Attract Hundreds of Thousands of New List Subscribers in Days

* How To Generate Hordes of Brand New Visitors Eager and Hungry To Buy Your Products

* How To Get On Page One of Google, Yahoo, and MSN

… and much, MUCH more.

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To find out more visit
http://www.trafficgenerationsummit.com/moneygym
===================================

If you want to create multiple streams of income on the Internet, you really do not want to miss this unique, one-off event.

Hurry though, as there are only 20 tickets available.

And I mean TOUT SUITE!!

To Your Success & Au Revoir!

Nicola Cairncross

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Claim Your Ticket And Your Bonuses Here:
http://www.trafficgenerationsummit.com/moneygym
===================================

Carmen, Casares and Camping Out

While taking delivery of a Marks & Spencers online clothes shop, I was reminded how sometimes tiny little things can make you feel happy, grateful and wealthy.  These are just a few of the things that have made me feel good this week.

1. A pile of 10 x soft new M&S t-shirts to wear (piles of new socks are great too!)
2. Being able to pay to book in immediately for emergency physio/acupuncture to relieve your cricked neck pain
3. Wearing your favourite perfume all day, every day
4. Getting a book recommendation from Michael at Triumphant Events, and buying that immediately, plus a Michael Masterson you want to read
5. Buying a whole new set of GOLD and pearl beaded bed bed linen on a whim, plus a bedside table – room truly looking fit for a princess now!  I know, I’m giving away my inner chav here but it was 15% off all bed linen at Dunelm Mills (love that place!).

On the speaking / live appearances front, Ambar Hamid’s Wealth Thing seminar was been moved to the weekend I’m in Paris with Sister Sarah, visiting Sister Heather who is rehearsing for Carmen at the Paris Opera House (Bastille) – she’s posting great “behind the scenes” pics from the set.

I got a Tweet from one of my Ecademy Blackstar maties to say his wife is on the same production and did I want to meet up for a coffee, as he’s out there on baby patrol?  Twitter really is great!

It’s our Money Gym Let’s Talk Money day this weekend which is sold out and which I’m looking forward to a lot.

I’m having dinner with my old friends from Spain, Rona & Adrian, the night before the workshop.  You may remember I talk about them in my book a lot, and we are swapping a three week stay in their beautiful house in Casares for a website to help them promote it for rental, now they are back in England.

You can see where me, Sarah & the kids are going to be spending August at http://www.HolidayRentalCasaresSpain.com.  When I dreamed of becoming financially free, it was travel I wanted most a la Tim Ferris’s “4 Hour Work Week” and I’m doing a fair old job of it the next couple of months.  Paris, Greece then Spain – lovely!

I’m still working on the website for Casares, but it’s coming along nicely.  Wait till I add little videos of the place and surrounding areas – those bluey-green weeks won’t stay unbooked for long!

We have firmed up the dates for the September start of the next Silver Elite programme

The current pilot of the programme is getting rave reviews and if I just had a bit more time I could get them on the bloomin’ page! The main thrust seems to be that you can join Silver and get all the information, but in order to actually take action, you need to feel accountable and that only happens in a group or 1:2:1 coaching environment.  If you like the sound of that for September, you can secure your place at a £500 discount if you are already a Silver member.

Our vision for The Money Gym has never been clearer and we are planning all sorts of exciting developments for 2010.  For 2009, We are racing against time to get all our projects finished so that I can start on renewing my current book then writing the next one.  It’s fun, it’s fast and it’s furious but the good news is, as ever, that we do the work once and the products are there for the foreseeable future.

It’s the main Beach Dreams weekend coming up, with two days of live bands, organic food, cider in the tent and lots of enjoyment all round.  Phoebe has SOMEHOW talked me into letting her put up a 12-man tent in the garden and cramming a load of teenagers into it for the night.  Well, I would rather they were here and safe, than hanging about the tent / beach on Saturday night.  It does mean a bit of a dash from London after our workshop but hey, it’ll be a laugh!

In the meantime, I’m reading “How To Get Rich” by Felix Dennis and it’s jolly good!  One of Britain’s wealthiest self made entrepreneurs, it’s described by the Independent On Sunday as “startlingly frank and very funny” and so it is.

Have fun, we always do (bad neck notwithstanding!)

Nicola

Property Investors Under The Hammer | £5000+ For The Big Issue!

Last week I was feeling very odd, in the lead up to our Property Extravaganza.  It was obvious by the beginning of the week that thanks to Judith’s inspired marketing emails, the guest line up and Steve’s working the “back end” so masterfully, we were going to sell out the venue, so there was no pressure there to get more bums on seats.  Judith and Steve had done all the organising and hard work, keeping me out of that aspect deliberately as detail is not my strong point!  I realised that I was experiencing the whole event as a customer and while it was most enjoyable, it was very odd.

To distract myself, I went to the ever-excellent Martin Avis’ London Lunch for internet marketers and spent a lovely hour or so on our table with Money Gym maties Susanne Jorgensen, Tricia Stone, Matt Garrett, Tim Brocklehurst and a new gentleman called Peter who had a hard time getting a word in edgeways!

Then off to the ever enjoyable Cumberland Hotel to meet Steve for drinks and dinner in the Gary Rhodes brasserie, which was nice but not all that (compared with the restaurant which is GORGEOUS!).  Lovely hotel room overlooking Park Lane and Marble Arch.

So, where do I start with a review of saturday?  It was a totally amazing day, with about 150 Money Gym clients there, both previous and current.  Judith herself, stepping into her star profile at last, and Alexis Garnaut-Miller who was a client from pre-Money Gym days even and who has just joined the Membership Club Magic programme!  From the first year or so of The Money Gym in it’s current format, it was lovely to see Sarah Mallett and Julia McDaid.  I also met people like Oliver, a property developer from Worthing, who I knew from my first ever Russ Whitney weekend which must have been 2003 or 2004….and who also turned up recently at one of our Cashflow games.

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NLP Is Dangerous | Responsible For Nicola’s Karaoke Debut

OK, if you ever needed proof that NLP is dangerous….here it is.  And if you ever needed proof that I should leave the singing to Heather Cairncross – ok, here it is.  Wayne Buckhanan of NLP At Sea is my new best friend from the Internet Marketer’s Cruise and he deffo NLP’d me into doing my first karaoke on the Internet Marketer’s Cruise and let’s just say………..my poker playing is better than my singing! The little shimmy at the end was marvellous though….almost worth watching it through to the bitter end LOL

Notice how the video of the US plane coming down in the Hudson river is shown as a related video……….what are they trying to say? It was reported on the cruise tv’s the very next day…………oh no! It can’t be true…..LOL

Wealth Coach Diaries: Nicola’s Week

This week I co-hosted a “Rent To Own / House For £1″ evening at the Burlington Hotel in Worthing, with David Lee and his lovely wife, on one of the hottest days of the year so far.  We had a bumper turnout with over 30 property investors and aspiring RentToOwn’ers there and it was great to meet new friends and old – Hi Mandy, David and Tyrone!

Well the big day is finally here – my sister Heather Cairncross’ second “Gira Con Gershwin” concert at the Ropetackle Arts Centre in Shoreham.  She previously performed it at the Arundel Festival last year and it was so well recieved she was persuaded to put it on again.  Tickets were slow to move at first, but once we set up the Heather Cairncross fanclub on Facebook, and I enouraged her to email her Arundel list a couple more times, we started to get some ticket sale action.

Kept telling her, you gotta touch people about 7 times with your sales message in different ways….and I hope she will let me do a Jeff Walker “product launch formula” with her next time.  Singing postcards by email, now there’s a thought….

I was hoping to beam it live from my laptop via http://www.Justin.tv/wealthcoach but I’m not sure the main concert hall has wireless broadband – it certainly does not get a mobile phone signal *sigh*.

Talking of product launches, Tim Brocklehurst is warming up to release the DVD’s of his Freedom Class weekend, which we all went on recently.  YOu can see Steve being uncharacteristially outgoing here while you watch these 8 excellent short videos about viral marketing and the power we are all tapping into now http://viralurl.com/moneygym/actionfreedom

Tomorrow, as it’s a kid free weekend, I’m off to lunch with one of my poker buddies, Paul Stanford, small business specialist.  Check out his fab new blog Steve made him… some great articles there already.  http://www.paulstanford.co.uk/blog/ – dont’cha just love that template which fitted his existing branding so well.

Heather came to view the poker league this week and met some of my poker buddies, including Paul.  She might come and play soon but Monday is jazz night at the Hare & Hounds in Worthing and it takes a lot to tear her away from live jazz.

I’ve just been called away from writing this, to film Steve’s golf swing with my little Flip Video camera….one of the more esoteric uses for it….LOL.  He’s got a bit of a loop going on and his mum will be consistently beating him until he fixes it apparently.  I would upload it to Viddler.com for your enjoyment and/or tips, but I fear he would, then, be justified in leaving!

Now, are you having fun in the sun?  We are!

Nicola

Wealth Coach Diaries: Nicola’s Week

Are you panicking about the property market?  Or just about the economy generally?  I was watching the news last night and right next to the headline about the awful building conditions of schools in China, a major contributory factor in the disaster out there, I spotted one that said “Banks pull the plug on buy-to-let landlords”.

So I went looking for it this morning.  Found it on Google of course at at The Times Online.  Here is just a snippet of this “good-times” article…By Lauren Thompson and Grainne Gilmore. 
 
“The era of the amateur landlord has all but ended, with banks effectively refusing to lend to new entrants to the buy-to-let market. Thousands of existing landlords also face huge increases in the cost of remortgaging, experts said yesterday. The warning came as HBOS, Britain’s biggest group of lenders, imposed the third increase in the cost of residential mortgages in as many weeks. Cheltenham & Gloucester, the fourth-biggest lender, also increased some of its rates for the second time in three weeks. First-time landlords, including parents eager to buy a house for their student children, will now find it almost impossible to enter the housing market. Lenders have stopped offering buy-to-let loans or severely tightened their lending criteria for prospective landlords and many of the existing one million buy-to-let mortgage holders approaching the end of their terms.

The development comes as senior figures in the housing industry predict up to two years of declining house prices. The problems in the buy-to-let market are compounded by fears that the target of many would-be landlords – apartment blocks in cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Cardiff – are facing a rapid decline in their value.

Katie Tucker, of the broker John Charcol, said: “After another week of turmoil in mortgage markets, novice landlords now face huge difficulties securing a loan, and thousands of existing landlords coming to the end of fixed-rate deals will find it very hard and very expensive to switch mortgage providers if they have not built up at least 75 per cent equity in their buy-to-let property.” This week Abbey withdrew virtually its entire range of buy-to-let mortgages, leaving only an expensive fixed-rate deal of 6.99 per cent for direct customers…..”

READ MORE HERE >>> (if you can bear it!)

Notice they are talking about amateur landlords (none of our Money Gym-ers can be called that), about how new build are going to be worst hit (we always steer our cleints well away from over-priced new builds) and I have to ask what on earth any self respecting landlord would be doing getting their buy-to-let from a high street building society – really, I have no idea…………

However, the “Related links” section included “Housing gloom: the silver lining” and if you need cheering up you can read that one here where David Budworth says

“A falling property market does have some benefits! The storm clouds looming over the housing market grow darker every day. But for some aspiring homeowners there could be a silver lining, with bargains emerging as asking prices tumble and sellers become ever more desperate to get properties off their hands. It takes courage to buy at a time when some commentators are predicting that house prices could fall a further 15 per cent. Even Britain’s biggest lenders and surveyors, which have an interest in talking up the market, now admit that they expect property prices to fall. Asking prices for properties new to the market were down by an average of 0.1 per cent over the past month, according to Rightmove.co.uk, the property website. In some regions the slide has been even more severe: in the North West prices fell by 1.4 per cent and in London by 0.9 per cent. And it could become much worse. David Miles, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, says that up to 1.2 million people – one in ten homeowners – could be pushed into negative equity, where their mortgages are greater than the value of their property.

As the gloom spreads, though, bargains are beginning to emerge. Michael Holt, of Charterhouse Standard Holdings, has been buying residential property on behalf of private investors for more than a decade and says: “We are spotting some great bargains. Even if the market continues to struggle in the near term, buy and hold for five or ten years and you will almost certainly make a healthy profit.”

Now, if you study all that carefully you will see that, again, there is hardly any fact, but plenty of opinion.  On the one hand “some commentators are predicting a further 15% fall, whereas in some regions the “severe slide” has been 1.4% in one month……even multiplying that by 12 months, I can’t get it to make 15%. 

The average fall has been 0.1% which on a property of £200k means a drop of….ooooohhhh…..£200 on value.

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Happy Birthday | Patricia Ann Lish

My mother Patricia Ann Lish, was a talented performer and a dancer, is 69 today and in 2009 she will be 70. As far as I know.

She was in musical theatre and performed in the first West End production of The King & I, with Yul Brynner.   I think she played the “Little Eva” part.  She was also, with my “Aunt”, her best friend whose name I can’t spell but was pronounced Aethnae, a member of the dance troup The Dolly Birds, who appeared with Lionel Blair on one of the first TV shows in the very early 60’s. After a glass of wine, they told racy stories of travelling the country in dance acts, repertory theatre, dodgy b&b’s and Adam Faith!

When she met my father, Thomas Cochrane McKenzie, a naval officer, she fell in love, and was forced to give up her showbiz career and get married, by her mother, Amelia Lish, who was a wonderful woman but a right old matriarch. You had to give stuff up for love in those days…..you couldn’t have it all unless you were particularly strong willed and lucky.

She ended up back in Worthing, with two small babies, on her own most of the time, because Tom was at sea a lot. I remember him coming home and imposing his presence and rules on us but he was a distant and frightening figure. He was also a philanderer of the worst kind, smuggling women off the ship on one gangplank as my mother and his children came up the other. She knew but was trapped and helpless.

For some reason, he kept her short of money even though he was a First Officer in the Merchant Navy, and she had to go out to work in the local telephone exchange at night, leaving us in the good care of Janet, who was totally blind but somehow managed to look after us.

When I was about 7, and my sister Heather about 5, Mum suffered badly from depression, caused by loneliness, stress (and massive disappointment in life I would imagine).

She was forced by her doctor, her mother and my father, to endure several episodes of electric shock treatment during the 1960’s. This led to a complete breakdown and Dad took her off on a “world cruise” to recover. How much of a cruise going away on a Ben Line Merchant Navy ship might have been…..

One minute our mum was there, every day, all the time, the next she was gone – for two years. The abandonment issues that has caused are still very real. We were sent to live with our aunt and uncle who did their best, but we were desperately unhappy, and we ended up with our nan and grandad, who we loved, settled in with and were blissfully happy with.

Then Mum came home – and with a new Dad, the Chief Engineer from the same ship, another Scots sailer! A messy divorce ensued, two more children who we loved dearly and treated as our dollys, and we all – though my mum had nothing from her marriage due to a crap deal she made with my father who never honoured his side – gradually pieced their lives together. My stepfather was a good man – Alexander “Sandy” Cairncross who we came to love and still call Dad.

However, my Mum was not easy to live with, always striving to make something of herself and she made us all move every 18 months, buying up and renovating houses, clawing her way up the property ladder. Going from money in the bank, to debt on credit card, selling to pay it all off and starting again, creating equity as she went.

But the stress and constant moving took its toll, my dad escaped – as men often do – by having a long-running affair, and she eventually found out after months of him (and all of us) telling her she was imagining it. He left, she finished the latest house project, rented out the rooms and promptly had another breakdown, so total that I had to sign the papers to section her, as she was a danger to herself. I was 18.

She’s never been right since and while she looks like my mum, on the outside, on the inside she is paranoid to the point of hearing voices all the time, she is foul mouthed, racist and homophobic. Not good as I married a black man, her grandchildren are a beautiful chocolate colour, and my brother is gay.

Where is she now? No idea. Not dead, but she might as well be.

Her illness has made her impossible to be around, and she just won’t take the bloody tablets!  Paranoid Schizophrenia is a terrible thing – they look like the people you know and love, but their minds are taken over by the illness.  In my mum’s case, she has become a racist, homophobic old lady, which is awful because my ex-husband Irving Soremekun has half Nigerian, my children Phoebe Soremekun and Nelson Soremekun are a lovely chocolate colour, and my brother Alex is a happily gay man.

But it was her who taught us to be tolerant of all people, so it’s doubly shocking that her illness has changed her so completely.  And it’s doubly tragic that the so-called “Care In The Community” means that, unless she is a danger to herself or to others, she will get no help.  One doctor who shall remain nameless, once told us three sisters “Well at least she isn’t lonely with all those voices in her head!”.

Why am I paying tribute to her?

Because she was a bright, strong, talented woman who had a bloody tough life, who never had a chance to fulfil her potential.

Before her first breakdown she made me feel loved and clever enough that I’ve never lacked confidence and know that I can do anything I want to in life. She passed on her creativity and drive.

She instilled in me an ability to read, and a love of reading, and that love of reading has enabled me to learn anything I wanted to, since leaving school.

Her unintentional abandonment of us as very small girls, has pushed both of us to seek approval and love by being clever and special and needing to perform. I now own a business fulfilling my mission of giving women choice, and escaping economic traps, and I speak and write, and my sister, Heather Cairncross is now a world class Opera and Jazz singer

Everything I am, is down to her.

This is my tribute to my mother, Patricia Ann Lish.

Nicola’s Week: Wealth Coach Diaries

Moodling, Canoodling & Just Saying Yes!

My daughter’s school has sent home information about their new online elearning environment called Moodle, accessible from any connected computer apparently. I first heard about Moodle via Chris Barrow as he played with the idea of using it to run the elearning / content management system for his dentist clients. I downloaded it and had a look at it for our Money Gym clients, prior to our membership site, but it was one of of those Open source programmes, a bit like Joomla and AMember and even really Wordpress, which unless you ARE ACTUALLY a rocket scientist, you have no hope of installing and then successfully working with yourself.

I have had a look around, in her account, although the bare bones are there and the initiative is brilliant, there does not seem to be any actual content yet. Phoebe hasn’t seen it yet but I’m sure she will be delighted to cut into her MSN and texting time, to do her homework online, which I now will actually know about! NOT.

Busy few weeks for speaking engagements as I’m off to Yorkshire this weekend, to stay at Hazlewood Castle on Sunday night, ready to speak to the Yorkshire branch of The Institute of Directors breakfast meeting on Monday. It’s a 4.5 hour trip each way, so the laptop batteries will be fully charged up, and hopefully the train to York from Kings Cross will have a power source! It had better had!

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