As I mentioned in my post titled “Is Knowledge to Action a Scam?” the bulk of people who complain about training courses are normally people who are trying to avoid the risk of changing their life. Risk is scary for many people so providing an opportunity to change their life can cause a lot of internal conflict.

Most people like to stay “safe and comfortable” with their life even though, deep down, they are very aware that this is not how you reach your dreams and goals.

People who complain about the cost of a course or the fact that the educators don’t provide lunch tells me this person is looking for any excuse to invalidate the chance to change.

If you do want to change your life and you have heard about a course that could help you get closer to your goals, but you see a negative review or comments about the course, ALWAYS look behind the comments and look at the person who wrote the review. You will normally find a person who constantly complains and has a “safe and comfortable” approach to life.

Is this how you want to live your life as well?

I will always ask the people who attended the course to see what value they got to help me make a decision – not the “tire kickers of life”.

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Formerly from the UK, I grew up in mediocre town, went to mediocre school and I followed in the footsteps of my parents. I went to school to get a great education hoping that one day I’ll be able to afford anything I wanted. Soon it was time to leave studies and focus on my “career”. I got a job, I earned, I paid my bills and got a car to match my job. Without realising at the time, that was the biggest mistake of my life. Obtaining the car through finance and having that liability to pay every single month. This is the first signs to becoming financially unstable and ultimately forming part of the daily rat race that will see me trapped forever.

To make your money work for you, there is one simple rule and I only learnt this much later in life. Focus on assets as opposed to liabilities. It’s that simple. Liabilities being everything that takes money away from you, finance, mortgage, credit cards, personal loans, those are the things that will ultimately make you poor. Think about it, you go to work to get paid, you pay off your mortgage debts, car loans and the circle begins again.

However the assets – this is something that puts money in to your pocket. If you want to be rich, spend your life buying assets and I have chosen to work within tangible assets, something you can see, feel, stay in and sell on. I work with tangible assets within emerging and distressed markets that not only appreciate, but you earn from rental income, rental income that puts money in to your pocket every single month to supplement your income from your daily job.

Making your money work for you is easier than you actually think. For example, If you want a nice new car, instead of thinking, I can’t afford the car – why not think, HOW can I afford the car. Personally I would look for money making assets; my chosen example would be real estate. I carefully invest in to an emerging market or a distressed market that will generate me income, with that income I’ve generated from my money making asset; I can afford to pay for the car loan without losing any liquid cash. Once the car is paid for, I now have an income generating assets that has appreciated in value, plus a nice new car that is mine to own 100%.

Depending on how much money you have to start with, you could use the example above to generate you future financial success to overcome mortgage repayments, car loans, credit card bills and to secure that all important financially free future. Once you have obtained the asset, it will usually look after itself without any support from you whatsoever.

So as my first post and if you’re reading this, take a look at what you can cancel out in your life to free up more cash to focus on building that asset column of your own. Take a look at your cash flow, where you get your cash and where it goes because that will tell you a story of how you handle your money.

Remember, it’s the Assets vs. The Liabilities and now is the time to learn the difference between the two.

I run a small investment consultancy and I’m always seeking ways to further my wealth creation through real estate, feel free to send me an email and follow us on twitter and Facebook.

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Sonam and Bayermaa are happy, and modestly proud with reason. Sonams only son is strong and vital, and a walking painting of father; the three daughters Bayermaa bore are all sharp of wit, keen of frame and visage, and will be well-contested when they come of age in the small village. The family work hard and willingly, either in the long hours of summer or a little more frenetically when the clouds settle in for winter. The fields are well tilled, and there is always tsampa and chang, butter tea and time available for guests or elders who are passing the family home. And so lifes melody has skipped along, with intermittent ups and downs, childrens bruises and tantrums and all the texture one might expect in a good life.

Yet Sonam was beginning to be troubled. The source of this abrasion he could identify, and so slowly it gained power, he became restless, and eventually the chang he put so much of his time into could not suppress this itch. He began to stir constantly at night, until Bayermaa could not help but be woken; yet Sonam could not tell her what bothered him, merely say “it’s nothing, it’s nothing”, and force himself to lie still. But by dawn, when he had been staring at the slate above him, Sonam could stand it no more.

When the family had all gotten about their work for the day, Sonam slipped away to seek out Anil. Anil was the oldest male in the village, frail, blinded by cataracts, yet alert and always willing to expound upon any matter in the village, although his thoughts might take quite some time and tea to be finally rolled out, like the bright little pebbles one would play with in his youth. Sonam explained this uncalled for and bothersome thorn had developed in his soul; he was aggrieved, he said to Anil “I have worked hard in my short years, I have good land and good people around me, my hands are skilled and I always contribute well when the men sit to ponder the seasons and workings of the valley together, I have by all gods, been most fortunate — why may I not be content — yet I feel, I feel, its not enough.. this is an unworthy feeling”

Anil considered his response a long time, and finally, said to Sonam, “many nights I have watched you, since you were a small boy. Now your family is grown, they do not need your chivvying and strong arms to lift them, Bayermaa is dutiful and a good mirror to you, yet your wits are undimmed and indeed, you are almost, idle” raising his hand to forestall the protest this word would bring. “I have seen you begin to reflect on yourself in the chang, yet there is no answer there, indeed I had hoped you would see this yourself. But it is now clear to me, you are now drowning in your own unused vitality. Why are you not using your strengths and mind to grow as a man and be beyond yourself?”

“Anil”, said Sonam, “I am an empty well, long I have thought, and yet I have no answer”. “Then you must seek inspiration, Sonam. May I suggest that you will not find it here, in the four walls of this valley you know so well. You need to climb Sonam, climb above and look beyond what you know.” “How then, should I do this, Anil?” Anil looked Sonam straight in the eye, and said — “it is a simple thing. You need many days tsampa, a strong hoe, and a good waterskin. You must climb (mount) Kailash and seek your answer from her at her peak. You should go now, before the winter truly arrives. I will explain this to Bayermaa. If you do not, this poison in your soul will grow, and then it will begin to infect us all — this is nature”

Sonam left that very evening. Many days he climbed, for Mount Kailash was 7 days walk to her feet, and then slowly, slowly he began the ascent. As he climbed past the first notes of the glacier, into the moraines and moss-struck boulders, he wondered, the first of many times, “ai, this madness, will it be my end?” The days passed and Sonam was now a stick figure on the bright slopes, able to be seen by hawks and bright adolescents maybe, but he was now truly ascending unheard of and terrifying heights. His boots were failing, blisters were formed and bleeding and he began to chafe and these constant pains and knocks to his spirit were indeed mounting against his resolve. Yet still he climbed. On the 14th day he nearly broke.

The wind had begun in earnest, each step was a torture to his thighs, the snows were beginning to form above Kailashs brow, yet still he climbed, stumbling, slipping, now sliding back foot after foot, now gaining, his lungs stabbed at each breath with “the little knives” of winter. Yet still he climbed. He could not stop.

For Sonam knew how, he would go on or perish, for walking down now was as bad an option as going up — he did not have the werewithal to make the bottom before he failed utterly in his strength. And so he faced his fate, turned his face to the slopes again, and lifted us foot up, again, again again… The following morning, at about that time of day when the first red rays court the clouds, the mists and echoes began to disperse, a cleanliness and sombre sparseness began to surround Sonam. 30 steps, 25 steps, 20 steps to go, 10, now a stumble, a sob, another step, 2 more, now 6 to go, and finally, when his heart truly was leaping out of his chest, he placed his hand on the summit if Kailash.

Many long minutes he kneeled there, eventually gaining back his breath, and knowing that he had achieved a tremendous victory over himself, and calm, clear and proud as he was, he still had no understanding of why he had needed to do it. It was then that Anils voice came to him. “Sonam, Sonam” the voice whispered. “Anil? Is that you”, Sonam replied peering all around him, wondering if he had gone mad. For there was nothing to be seen, save the hundreds of kilometres of mountain peaks, snow rock and ice and a blue sky so sharp it was blinding. There was no place here for a trifling human. “Sonam, Sonam, why are you here?” cried the voice. Sonam stood, and puzzled as he was, could not answer, until it came to him, Anil had said all those long days ago, “you must seek inspiration, Sonam” Swaying now, tottering in the breeze like an old man, Sonam finally replied ” I am here to seek inspiration”

The answer came back from the void —
“and here you are, Sonam, having become what you sought – here you are”

See you at the Masters, Sunday May 23rd

And folks, remember to enter our competition for Free tickets to the Masters day and Free copies of Seans book More competiton details here

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“It might not be the house that you want to live in long-term, but you could buy a $350,000 house in Te Atatu, Glenfield, Panmure or Pukekohe,” he said. “People should spend less money on coffee and brand new cars and overseas trips.

“It’s up to them to save more. This is a culture of ‘I want it now, I want everything and I deserve it’.”

Yesterday, the Government floated the idea of property developers being forced to build low-cost homes in new estates to ease Auckland’s housing shortage. Housing Minister Chris Carter after two new reports revealed that New Zealand’s most populous region faces a severe housing shortage and must accommodate growing numbers of people who may rent all their lives.

A study on rental housing by Wellington consultants DTZ predicts falling home ownership, a big increase in the number of people renting – particularly young families and the elderly – and a growing demand for rental accommodation.

Even households making $70,000 a year are being locked out of home ownership, the report says. The city will need almost 55,000 new houses and flats in the next 10 years. But high development costs are strangling new-house building – a topic the second report examines.

The housing supply report by consultants Motu proposes speeding up resource consent approvals by financially punishing councils for delays. It also suggests abolishing the artificial city limit boundary, freeing new tracts of land for development.

Mr Carter said he had two solutions – a new law that is yet to win support from other politicians, and funding for shared-equity schemes, which he expects to be in next year’s Budget. The minister wants to force developers to build a proportion of cheap houses in large new Auckland estates. He said the move had succeeded in Australia.

“We would consider a home affordability bill to direct developers to build a certain portion of affordable housing,” he said.
“I’m enthusiastic about this but I need to convince my colleagues.”

He also favoured shared-equity schemes, in which the Government takes a stake in a house to reduce the cost for first-home buyers. The scheme had been introduced in Britain. Money for a pilot scheme should be made available in next year’s Budget, Mr Carter said, but numbers were yet to be decided. He promised to issue a report within six weeks outlining options, and said a new law could be passed next year. The reports sparked strong reactions from developers and landlord and tenant groups.

Patrick Fontein, an Auckland developer building a $400 million 500-house and apartment project at Orewa, was concerned about Mr Carter’s cheap housing proposals. Forcing developers to build low-cost houses in new estates was no solution to the affordability crisis, Mr Fontein said.

The move could lower the tone of new estates and force buyers of higher-priced houses to subsidise the cheaper housing. Mr Fontein said Mr Carter should work out ways to help people into existing homes rather than new housing, which was often out of reach for many first-home buyers.

Angela Maynard, co-ordinator for the Tenants Protection Association in Auckland, called for more quality rental accommodation and better security of tenure. Landlords should have to get warrants of fitness for their houses or flats before finding tenants, she said, to ensure minimum standards were set.

Landlords should also have to give reasons for eviction, which could be achieved by amending the Residential Tenancies Act. “At the moment, you can give a tenant 90 days’ notice without a reason,” she said. “We want landlords to give just cause for eviction.”

She said she was not surprised to find that people making up to $70,000 a year were faced with a lifetime of renting, but said the city’s property market was based purely on greed.

“Everyone in the equation is greedy and trying to get more and more,” Ms Maynard said.

The Salvation Army’s director of social policy, Major Campbell Roberts, called for swift Government action, saying very little had been done to alleviate Auckland’s crisis. The region’s state housing supply was under considerable stress, forcing many people into the private rental market where rents had risen in the last year, Major Roberts said.

He urged a wide-sweeping range of solutions, including more state housing and more care and professionalism from private landlords. “Mom and pop investors are not in the rental market primarily to provide accommodation,” he said. “They are there for investment and superannuation purposes, so if another type of investment comes along, they shift their money. They don’t care about the tenant.”

Hugh Pavletich, a Christchurch developer and investor and co-author of the Demographic housing affordability report, welcomed the Motu report in particular, saying its recommendations had stunned him because they were so radical.

The recommendations went much further than he had expected, he said, advocating freeing of Auckland land for housing – necessary to start solving the city’s housing crisis – and punishing councils for lengthy resource consent delays.

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So what are important guidelines one should follow when thinking of attending a seminar?

1. Be aware of the free or low priced seminar. Attend with an open mind. Usually these are just a teaser for a more expensive product or event. The presenter gets you into a state of mind (NLP) at the end and you are encouraged to purchase an expensive item you may not normally do so.

2. Ensure if you do sign up for anything they have a quality cooling down period should you change your mind in the days to follow. In some countries law states that these are compulsory now.

3. Research the company and presenter or get independent advice before attending. This is where PropertyTalk Forums are good.

4. Do they offer money back guarantees that are realistic? Check the fine print and requirements on the guarantee. Some have specific guidelines you have to follow before you are eligible for a refund. The majority of people may fall outside these and simply may not be able to get a refund should they have a problem at a later date.

5. Find someone who has been to the seminar previously and establish that you will learn the stuff you want to learn.

6. Make a promise to yourself that you will not commit to purchasing an OTP (off the plan) property at a Seminar – unless you have prior experience in property investment and know the local investment market of the development including location etc. And with the ‘prior experience’ when committing to a S&P Agreement put in lots of special conditions to give yourself enough opt-out clauses should your due diligence prove the property is a lemon.

7. Review your seminar notes. Clarify anything you don’t understand. Start plugging any knowledge gaps that the seminar may have uncovered.

8. Do they allow you to re-attend at a later date for free or at a heavily reduced price, If it is a high end presentation? Some information packed presentations are often intense on the brain. This will allow you time to go over and digest the information for several months. Then put the process into practice and Re-attend. You will always pick up different things the second time around having been in the market place and done it.

9. Are you prepared to take action after the seminar? Perhaps a little self analysis as well if this is your fourth or even tenth seminar on property investing and you haven’t bought a property, perhaps a self development course is needed instead, to identify and help remove the barriers preventing action.

10.Prepare for the seminar, i.e., read a book by the main presenter or watch DVD or read postings/articles. This will enable you to hit the ground running. You’ll then know the style of the presenter, and, instead of being overwhelmed by a flood of information, you’ll be able to pick out what you want and what is new.

11.Is the $3995.00 + GST seminar purely a live presentation of the presenter’s $39.95 book? Would you be better off investing in $3995.00 + GST of investment/personal development books & CD’s/DVD’s of the live events?

12.Make a list of questions that you need answers to. Ask yourself: ‘What am I unsure of?’ and ‘What pieces of information do I need to be able to take action after the seminar?’

13.Take action! You can have all the knowledge in the world but you’ll never retire without ACTION. If you attend seminars and read without putting what you learn into action you are no better off than the person who hopes to retire by buying a weekly lotto ticket.

14.When doing your research ensure that the systems taught they actually use themselves. What I mean is: *Have they been actively using these techniques? Not just a couple of times. This will show it is a proven system. *In NZ or an appropriate market to which you will use it? No point learning a system which is not appropriate or proven for your country or position in the property cycle. Eg rule 6. OTP buildings are appropriate in the property cycle for booms and not leading into a slump. If a person has a “track record,” and is doing or has done what they’re counselling others to do, then that’s a good sign to look for when choosing a seminar, confidant or mentor. Quote from Perry “It’s the difference between speaking from experience and speaking about experience – usually others.” Always reminds me of ye olde spoof: Why don’t you take my advice? I’m not using it!

15.Is it purely an educational event or more of a networking day/weekend for the presenter and his associates? Will the line up of lawyer, accountant, valuer, property manager, lender, insurance broker & development specialist really add value to your education or are they really there to act as fillers for the two day weekend? Is each of these speakers well known practitioners or purely part of the travelling road show?

List Compiled by Whittaker Hamilton

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While money management skills can be quite easily leant, attitudes and behaviours are often more difficult to tackle. They can result from deeply ingrained beliefs or experiences. It’s important to realise what beliefs one has about money so one can establish which beliefs need changing.
Money Fantasies

Many people will have some kind of fantasy about money lurking in their subconscious. A person’s brain can trick them into believing these fantasies could actually happen. However if one really thought about it , it would become clear just how silly they really are. Do any of these sound familiar?

• Lottery Living: Actually believing you might nab a winning ticket, and believing this every week.
• Marry a Millionaire: And that single-minded focus keeps a person both single AND broke. A spouse is not a financial plan.
• Waiting for a Windfall: Miscellaneous hopes for an inheritance, a bank error in one’s favour, a pot of gold in the back of the garage, etc.
• Thinking someone is going to pay a wage that’s waaaaay more than they should, enabling one to retire in two years.
• Sudden Success: Sell that screenplay or invent a new kind of peanut butter which will make one into a gazillionaire.
• Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow: The title of an actual book that has created financial disaster for everyone who followed its precepts.
• Ignorance Is Profitable: The crack-based notion that by not paying attention to your money . . . one day you’ll wake up RICH!
• Things Have a Way of Working Out: When clearly they don’t if you don’t do anything about it.
• I’ll Do It Later: Time has an uncanny ability of disappearing and you wake up 30 years later still chanting to yourself you have plenty of time and will do it later.
• Money is not everything. Right! Try living without it for a month.
• Denial. I am not that out of shape

Now at this point readers are probably laughing. But, if you think about it, at some point in time, at least one of these thoughts has gone through your head, or you’ve heard someone else say them. Sometimes people make these comments in jest to either themselves or others, but it could be just what’s really going on in their head.

The most important point is that every person is responsible for their own beliefs about money and every person has the power to change these beliefs.

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Following are 10 tips which consistently increase our wealth creation.

Tip 1 – If you are in a low income bracket, investing $1,000 in your superannuation fund each year can net you a whopping 150% return from the Government’s Co-contribution scheme and in fact last year gave up to a 300% return.

Tip 2 – The best home renovation is to upgrade an old bathroom. With an estimated 102% return. Kitchens and windows come in second adding about 90%. But of course windows have the extra benefit of saving on your energy bills each year. In upgrading your property you also have the benefit of making it more saleable – an important consideration. As a rule, upmarket improvements pay off at lower rates than mid-range or inexpensive ones. And making a house bigger and more luxurious that those of your neighbours will also cost a lot more than it will return when the house is sold.

Tip 3 – It’s worth refinancing your mortgage when you can cut your interest rate by at least 1% and you expect to be staying in your house for a while. Otherwise the benefits of a lower monthly bill many not be worth the additional expenses of transaction costs and fees involved in any refinancing.

Tip 4 – For a home deposit, it’s best to come up with at least 20%.

Tip 5 – Your total housing payments should not exceed 28% of your gross income. Total debt payments should come in under 36%. These guidelines include payment on all loans, such as a car loan and credit card debt as well as any major payments, such as school fees.

Tip 6 – If it sounds too good to be true or you don’t understand how an investment works, don’t buy it.

Tip 7 – A lot of people who have large investment portfolios today, started out small. So aim to save at least 10% of your earnings for investment.

Tip 8 – Expect the unexpected and have an emergency account. Keep three months’ worth of living expenses in a high-yield savings account. If you have children you may need six months’.

Tip 9 – The earlier you start saving, the less you’ll need to set aside every year to meet your goals. That’s because you allow your money more time to grow – the gains on your invested savings will build on the prior year’s gains.

Tip 10 – Diversify your investments and then diversify within the areas. For instance, in property have residential and include commercial or if you only want residential, include a mix of homes and strata properties. This gives you the advantage of limiting your overall risks while giving you the best opportunity to capitalise.

Try to estimate future maintenance costs and work them into your budget. Some homes, especially older ones, may require more regular upkeep than homes built with more modern materials. Nothing outrageous. Just plain sensible suggestions.

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