Tag: finances

2019 Prediction: Silver

I’m going out on a limb here and making a prediction for 2019, that silver will rise up in value significantly.

Let me start right now with this…

Disclaimer: This post references an opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

I’ve been following silver for years since first getting interested back in it back in 2011.

It’s been part of my wealth building strategy. In a way, it’s a forced savings. Yes, you can sell your precious metals but there’s an added hurdle that can stop you from doing so.

In addition to buying onto and holding the physical silver, of which I have some, I use a trading service for easier use. With this I can automatically transfer money into silver every week or month.

I use a company known as OwnX.

(In the sake of transparency, I do get rewarded for people signing up through that link. It’s great in that it’s a way to have my precious metals generate interest sort of.)

They actually hold onto the physical silver (and gold) for you and you can take delivery at any time. There are some fees to this, but as mentioned their rewards program offsets it and then some, at least for me.

Back when I started buying silver it was actually at a higher price than now!

This may not sound too great to you when I’m saying it’s going to go higher.

Interestingly the highest price silver has ever been at was way back in January 1980 at $49.45. That’s not including inflation. Nothing, I repeat nothing else, has its highest price ever back in the 80’s.

There are a number of reasons that it won’t likely stay this way for long.

It seems that silver has had its price suppressed for a number of years and that has to end at some time. (For example, employees at JP Morgan Chase have just been found guilty of crimes in trading precious metals.)

Silver is not just used as a store of value, like gold is, but is used in a wide range of industries. Those uses are growing.

And less silver is coming out of the ground.

These reasons and more and some say a 10x in price is not unreasonable.

At the current price of close to $16 per ounce, silver is quite cheap. (Actually, it’s already gone up recently. It was just under $15 at the start of the year so the upwards movement may have already begun.)

Remember the bitcoin explosion that happened a little over a year ago? Did you profit from that? I did, as I started investing in Bitcoin a couple years before that ever happened.

Something similar could be happening in silver soon. Probably not quite as big, but certainly significant.

Exactly when, no one can say, but that’s how these things go.

Again, not investment advice, but just sharing something that I’m doing. And with this out there publicly, we’ll see how my prediction goes.

Money System that Never Fails – Money Offense and Defense

We continue from the Introduction to the Money System that Never Fails, with the next part on money offense and defense, and the four areas of wealth.

One of the pivotal books for me, that I read in that massive action period, was The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley. In it he talks about playing offense and defense with money. This was a big epiphany for me. I started to see that there were different areas of money. Offense could be likened to what you did to get money in the first place, i.e. producing an income. Defense was keeping the money and watching your expenses.

Offense and defense was a good starting point. But it became even more apparent when I added upon this idea and realized there were essentially four areas of wealth.

1. Income
2. Expenses
3. Saving
4. Investing

It seems so obvious now, but I didn’t see anyone specifically point this out. Understanding these four categories of money is the foundation to this system.

Finally, this explained why people can have huge incomes and still end up broke. Lots of sports stars and celebrities are great examples of this. The first area is great but all the other three are not. As soon as the big income goes away they’re left with nothing because they’re not truly wealthy. One strength, with three weaknesses does not equal long term success.

It even explains why some people living on meager wages can still end up with large amounts after many years. Income may not be great but the others are even more important. Still I wouldn’t necessarily call these people wealthy either.

It was another epiphany to me to realize that with just minimum wage, you could become a millionaire, just by saving and investing.

At $7.25/hour, 2080 hours worked in a year is $15,080. Saving 10% of this would be $1,508 per year. Invested into something that provided a 5% annual rate of return, it would take 72.37 years to meet this goal.

Yes, that is a long time. And I’m guessing you don’t have that long to wait. But I’m willing to bet if you’re reading this you make more than minimum wage. In California, the minimum wage is raising up to $15/hour soon. In a year this is $31,200. 10% of that is $3,120. Invested at the same 5% annual rate it takes 58.1 years.

This shows that it can be done, showing the importance of savings and investing, and the commonly touted magic of compound interest. But the trick is, if you also optimize your income, then save even more, and invest even better it can all be done far faster, and yield even bigger results.

This is just an extreme example, meant to show you the possibilities. Something to think about is how much money has passed through your hands over your lifetime so far? How much more do you think will happen over time?

If you want to look at other similar calculations you can use this online duration calculator.

Not understanding these four areas of wealth is probably the biggest setback in any money or wealth program or coaching because they are incomplete.

But what happens when you optimize all four areas? Magic!

Each area has some unique traits that best help it out, that are not in the other areas. Each area has specific habits you should do, which are not in the other areas. The good news is that you’re probably doing okay in some areas but just one or two of them falls short.

We all have our strengths and our weaknesses. In this case it is important to play to your strengths, but also to shore up your weaknesses too. The star ball player will be great off with that amazing income, if they make sure the other areas are taken care off.

Thus, when it comes to crafting your wealth plan you must include each of these areas. And each one will have goals and action steps for you to take. Let’s make sure you’re clear on what these four areas are:

1. Income

Money coming in. For a business, this is revenues. Personally, this may be an hourly rate, salary, royalties or whatever else. It also includes selling things, or services whether at a yard sale, on eBay, or wherever else.

2. Expenses

Money going out. Money is used as an exchange of value, so this is where you spend it on stuff. Of course, this occurs both in businesses and personally.

3. Savings

When you get income, it is turned into savings. Most people do this backwards, which is why they don’t have savings. More details on this in the next section. Also note that different types of savings are used for different purposes. Specifically, I consider savings when money is transferred from the income/expense account to a savings account for a specific purpose.

4. Investments

Money from income or savings can then be turned into investments. Active investments are those that generate more income. While you can invest in things like precious metals, these are stores of value, and don’t actually generate income, so these are passive. Understand this difference between active and passive investments.

All of these can be further broken down into more categories. But if you just get these four areas, and the differences of each, you’re ahead of where most people are at. A lot more on each of these to come next.

The Money System That Never Fails is now available in paperback and Kindle at Amazon.

Money System that Never Fails – Introduction

I’m working on a book that shares about money and finances. It shares my system that took me from a mountain of debt to being very comfortable and on projection for riches to come. The working title is “The Money System Than Never Fails” because it is just that. It is a systematic approach to money that anyone can adopt. Of course, I would highly recommend doing so.

None of these things are unique to me. Most of it I picked up from many sources. However, I started working on this system because I never saw anyone cover finances in a holistic manner like this.

Below is the introduction to this book. I might even be sharing the entire thing, over time, here on the blog. On that note, I’d love to hear your comments, if you want to see more of this…

“Wealth is not the man that has it, but the man who lives it.”
– Benjamin Franklin

When I was growing up, I saw how my parents handled money. We weren’t poor by any stretch, but I thought of us as in the lower middle class, while some friends’ parents of mine were in the upper middle class. I have no idea if that is financially accurate, I’m not sure if there are official positions for those spots, it’s just the way it seemed to me at the time.

While my friends’ parents owned nice houses, we rented, and were forced to move a couple times because changes in ownership. While my friends’ parents seemed to spend more just on little things here and there, such as family outings, I saw my mother and father fight about money.

In high school, I started to get interested in money. On a friend’s encouragement I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. This is turn led me to reading Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. I decided then that I would have a million dollars by the time I was 25. Seemed doable at the time.

I started putting some money into stocks. I felt like I was on top of my personal finances. I made money and I saved a lot of it. But this was just because I didn’t have many expenses. I didn’t even have a car until I was 20.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I start my business as a personal trainer, while still being employed.

Specifically, it was in going into business that I would begin my financial descent. While I did well personally, I knew nothing about business nor the changes in finances in there. Being a solopreneur, I rode the roller coaster of unstable income, and constantly reinvesting money back into my business, mostly in the form of more education. While this was good, I was doing it in an irresponsible way.

My debt started to grow. At its highest point, I was around $25,000 in credit card debt. Throughout this time, as you might imagine, I developed a strained relationship around money.

One of the first major turning points around money for me (of which I’ve identified three occasions) was pointed out by one of my coaches. He told me to say the phrase, “I Appreciate Money.” As soon as I said it, I could feel the sinking feeling in my chest, and I knew that it wasn’t true.

Once you know a few tools that can help to transform beliefs, then it is the finding of them that is the hard part. We did some work to clear that up. The following transformation in my financial life was nothing short of extraordinary.

Within a couple of months, I made more money than I ever had before in my business. I was able to pay off my debt completely. And I noticed that I always had cash in my wallet. I was never without money.

My relationship to money became far better than it was previously.

But like all things, that was just one turning point. An even bigger change was coming up on the horizon…

Although I got out of debt and started to develop some savings, I would find that I would run up the bill on my credit cards a bit. Then, in a fit of frustration, I would borrow from my savings (with the intention to pay that money back, since I wasn’t supposed to touch it) to get back to zero.

This probably happened four or five times over the next few years.

Although I “appreciated” money, I still seemed to struggle with it. I couldn’t get ahead. Finally, I got fed up with this pattern and resolved to break it once and for good.

Here, I took massive action. Over the course of a few weeks I read at least 30 books on the topic of money and finances, looking for whatever missing keys to money I was lacking. I can’t say there was any one book that solved the problem for me. But all together they did.

While there were certainly some changes in beliefs during that time, the biggest change was in how I saw different forms of money, and how they all fit together systematically.

It was during this period that I largely developed the system that you’re about to read about. It was then that I developed my Wealth Generation Plan. This included new shifts in mindset and establishing habits, that would get me out of that repetitive cycle I was in.

From that day forward, getting ahead with money was never an issue. Every week, every month my net worth grew.

And still I was not done learning. …

With that plan in place my financial foundation was now in place as well. Over the next years I continued to grow financially…at least personally.

What happened was that one of my businesses, Lost Empire Herbs, grew to the point over the next few years, where the finances were a bit beyond my current skillset. While I had always done the Legendary Strength financial books myself (my other business), because they were simple to do, here we handed them out to a bookkeeper.

I lost track of what was happening. What money was coming in. What money was going out. But armed with my plan, I realized this problem sooner rather than later. I had to upgrade my financial skills even more. I had to learn how to read a Profit and Loss Statement, as well as a Balance Sheet. I had to figure out cash flow, in an inventory heavy business. I had to understand good debt, and how it can be used to fuel growth.

In addition to these new things, what I realized is that I needed the same type of foundation that I had personally, going on in the business. While the numbers were bigger, and many more transactions took place, it really wasn’t all that different from what I did personally.

Looking back on my life I can see these three pivotal moments and the periods in between. It’s a series of plateaus’ and jumps or exponential growth points. Because of the system though, ever since that took place, the plateaus are not flat, but are trending upwards. You can see a graphical representation of this here. While simplified, this is overall quite accurate to my financial life.

I’m sure there will be a couple more jumps in my future. There are always new things to learn. However, I don’t expect these to be quite as impactful as these few moments in time. That’s because the system is the rock on which it all stands. It will get better over time, but that foundation is now firmly set.

The Money System That Never Fails is now available in paperback and Kindle at Amazon.