Blogs

Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires

They’re just like you. But with lots of money.

When you think of “millionaire”, what image comes to your mind? For many of us, it’s a flashy Wall Street banker type who flies a private jet, collects cars and lives the kind of decadent lifestyle that would make Donald Trump proud.

But many modern millionaires live in middle-class neighborhoods, work full-time and shop in discount stores like the rest of us. What motivates them isn’t material possessions but the choices that money can bring. “For the rich, it’s not about getting more stuff. It’s about world of warcraft power leveling, having the freedom to make almost any decision you want,” says T. Harv Eker, author of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. Wealth means you can send your child to any school or quit a job you don’t like.

According to the Spectrem Wealth Study, an annual survey of America’s wealthy, there are more people living the good life than ever before — the number of millionaires nearly doubled in the last decade. And the rich are getting richer. To make it onto the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, a mere billionaire no longer makes the cut. This year you needed a net worth of at least $1.3 billion.

If more people are getting richer than ever, why shouldn’t you be one of them? Here are the secrets revealed by the people who have at least a million dollars in liquid assets.

1. Set your sights on where you’re going

Twenty years ago, Jeff Harris hardly seemed on the world of warcraft gold, road to wealth. He was a college dropout who struggled to support his wife, DeAnn, and three kids, working as a grocery store clerk and at a junkyard where he melted scrap metal alongside convicts (囚犯. “At times we were so broke that we washed our clothes in the bathtub because we couldn’t afford the Laundromat.” Now he’s a 49-year-old investment advisor world of warcraft gold and multimillionaire in York, South Carolina.

There was one big reason Jeff pulled ahead of the pack: He always knew he’d be rich. The reality is that 80 percent of Americans worth at least $5 million grew up in middle-class or lesser households, just like Jeff.

Wanting to be wealthy is a crucial first step. Eker says, “The biggest obstacle to wealth is fear. People are afraid to think big, but if you think small, you’ll only achieve small things.”

It all started for Jeff when he met a stockbroker at a Christmas party. “Talking to him, it felt like discovering fire,” he says. “I started reading books about investing during maple story mesos, my breaks at the grocery store, and I began putting $25 a month in a mutual fund.” Next he taught a class at a local maple story mesos community college on investing. His students became his first clients, which led to his investment practice. “There were lots of struggles,” says Jeff, “but what got me through it was believing with all my heart that I would succeed.”

2. Educate yourself

When Steve Maxwell graduated from college, he had an engineering degree and a high-tech job — but he couldn’t balance his checkbook. “I took one finance class in college but dropped it to go on a ski trip,” says the 45-year-old father of three, who lives in Windsor, Colorado. “I actually had to go to my bank and ask them to teach me how to read my statement (结算单.”

One of the biggest obstacles to making money is not understanding it: Thousands of us avoid investing because we just don’t get it. But to make money, you must be financially world of warcraft gold, literate. “It bothered me that I didn’t understand this stuff,” says Steve, “so I read books and magazines world of warcraft gold about money management and investing, and I asked every financial whiz (高手 I knew to explain things to me.”

He and his wife started applying the lessons: They made a point to live below their means. They never bought on impulse, always negotiated better deals (on their cars, cable bills, furniture) and stayed in their home long after they could afford a more expensive one. They also put 20 percent of their annual salary into investments.

Within ten years, they were millionaires, and people were coming to Steve for advice. “Someone would say, ‘I need to refinance my house — what should I do?’ A lot of times, I wouldn’t know the answer, but I’d go find it and learn something in the process,” he says.

In 2003, Steve quit his job to become part owner of a company that holds personal finance seminars for employees of corporations like Wal-Mart. He also started going wedding dresses, to real estate investment seminars, and it’s paid off: He now owns $30 million worth of investment properties, including apartment complexes, a shopping mall and a quarry.

“I was an engineer who never thought this life was wedding dresses possible, but all it truly takes is a little self-education,” says Steve. “You can do anything once you understand the basics.”

3. Passion pays off

In 1995, Jill Blashack Strahan and her husband were barely making ends meet. Like so many of us, Jill was eager to discover her purpose, so she splurged on a session with a life coach. “When I told her my goal was to make $30,000 a year, she said I was setting the bar too low. I needed to focus on my passion, not on the paycheck.”

Jill, who lives with her son in Alexandria, Minnesota, owned a gift basket company and earned just $15,000 a year. She noticed when she let potential buyers taste the World of warcraft gold, food items, the baskets sold like crazy. Jill thought, Why not sell the food directly to customers in a fun setting?

With $6,000 in savings, a bank loan and a friend’s investment, Jill started packaging gourmet foods in a backyard shed and selling them at taste-testing parties. It wasn’t easy. “I remember sitting outside one day, thinking we were three months behind on our house payment, I had two employees World of warcraft gold I couldn’t pay, and I ought to get a real job. But then I thought, No, this is your dream. Recommit and get to work.”

She stuck with it, even after her husband died three years later. “I live by the law of abundance, meaning that even when there are challenges in life, I look for the win-win,” she says.

The positive attitude worked: Jill’s backyard company, Tastefully Simple, is now a direct-sales business, with $120 million in sales last year. And Jill was named one of the top 25 female business owners in North America by Fast Company magazine.

According to research by Thomas J. Stanley, author of The Millionaire Mind, over 80 percent of millionaires say they never would have been successful if their vocation wasn’t something they cared about.

Time Off from Work Gains in Importance

American workers are saying they need a break. As their number of hours clocked on the job has crept higher, more time off has become a bigger priority. In the past few years, human resources experts say time off has consistently placed among the top three employee concerns, along with compensation and staffing levels, whereas it used to be farther down the list. In a Salary.com poll taken online in November 2004, 39% of workers said if given the choice, they would choose time off over the equivalent in additional base salary. Of course, most of the 4,600 respondents are still opting for the bigger paycheck, but the desire for time off is up almost 20% from just three years ago when Salary.com conducted a similar poll.

The reasons for this shift are many and varied. Some have to do with the way a new generation is thinking about work, while others are driven by how companies are responding to recent economic pressures.

A New Generation

The results may in part represent the needs of a new breed of workers. The average American is working one month (160 hours) more each year than a generation ago. According to recruiting and human capital management expert John Sumser, younger workers work for meaning first and money second. He goes on to warn employers that these are the people who are the foundation for the next workforce and they may world of warcraft power leveling, not buy the existing paradigm (范例. A study released in late 2004 by the New York-based Families and Work Institute concludes that the new brand of young workers is rejecting the work-centric style of their parents’ generation. The study, which examines changes world of warcraft power leveling in the workforce over the past 25 years, found that younger workers are more likely to be “family-centric” or “dual-centric” (with equal priorities on both career and family) rather than “work-centric” when compared to members of the Boomer Generation.

September 11th and the End of the Roaring Nineties

The impact of the terrorist attacks of September 11th cut across all age groups of the workforce. We collectively entered a new era, reevaluating life’s priorities and making changes in our attitude toward time spent at work versus hobbies and family. “I started looking at things completely differently. I’ve been far less willing to put in the 14-hour days necessary to get noticed and fast wow gold, climb the corporate ladder,” said Tony Jackson, a 43-year-old employee of a New York City-based financial services company. “Frankly, I can’t see that changing.”

Even before September 11th, some experts say the slow shift in worker attitudes was already underway due to the end of the roaring 1990’s, when hours were long and significant personal wealth was fast wow gold created. For those who fared well financially, some opted for careers of contract work where they could call more of the shots pertaining to (与……有关的 time off, or new occupations with greater personal rewards. For others, even if their bank accounts were not spilling over from America’s economic heyday (全盛时期, their own energy had been depleted due to unrelenting (毫不松懈的 years of work hours and high stress. They were ready for something less taxing.

Families and Work Institute President and co-founder Ellen Galinsky agrees. She says the Salary.com poll numbers show evidence of an increase in need for time off and a shift in thinking due to the fact that workers have been pushed to their limit in recent years. “This new generation of workers wedding dresses, is at the edge of how wedding dresses long they can work. It just feels like too much. They are not slackers (懒虫; they just don’t want more,” says Galinsky.

Monetary Needs Less Intense Due to Dual Income Households

“We’ve decided we prefer to have more time to ourselves,” says Carol Kornhaber, a New England software programmer in her late twenties. Kornhaber and her husband are both working but have sought out jobs where they are not pressed to put in long hours. Instead, they have insisted upon eight-hour days and having enough vacation time to travel, a major interest they share. Financial pressures are eased by both of them working and keeping a careful watch on their expenses. “We are lucky in a lot of ways to have found bosses who understand our needs.”

Burnout

Trying to squeeze more productivity out of workers may be nothing new, but it has become particularly acute in recent years. This has been due in large measure to recession-induced layoffs and other trends such as the rising cost of healthcare benefits. After a layoff, workers who remain behind are cheap aion kinah, often asked to pick up most or even all the load of the people who were let go, requiring more and more hours at the office. As new corporate initiatives are planned, the inverse is also true. As Sumser observes, “the additional workload, which cheap aion kinah runs across the economy from the office worker to the manufacturing line, seems to be a function of the cost of benefits. The regulations make it cheaper to add workload for existing employees than to hire new players.” The Families and Work Institute reports that nearly one third of U.S. employees often or very often feel overworked or overwhelmed by how much work they have to do. Nearly three out of four report that they frequently dream about doing something different from their current job.

Show Me the Money

Overworked or not, the majority in the Salary.com poll still chose to fatten their paycheck if given the choice. For many, it was a practical matter. Says Peggy Jones, an accountant in a Boston area business services company, “I already get three weeks a year that I can’t use up because I’m so busy. I’d definitely go for maple story mesos, the extra money to pay some bills or make a big purchase I’ve been holding off on.” For Jones, the realities of running a household and saving up for college for her children simply need to take precedence over extra free time.

Companies Are Already Responding

To many human resources experts it is inevitable that, given the growing maple story mesos health of the economy and the upcoming population-driven labor shortages as the Boomer Generation moves into retirement, the pendulum of control in the employee-employer relationship will swing back to the employee side. That is expected to begin in just a few years. According to human resources expert, Larry Schumer, at Salary.com, “since most companies succeed based on a motivated and capable workforce, they have offered and will continue to offer more paid flexibility, whether it be through tried and tested time-off programs or the next great idea.” Where will that new balance of employer versus employee needs lie? Time, or perhaps time off, surely will tell.

Will We Run Out of Water?

Picture a “ghost ship” sinking into the sand, left to rot on dry land by a receding sea. Then imagine dust storms sweeping up toxic pesticides and chemical fertilizers from the dry seabed and spewing them across towns and villages.

Seem like a scene from a movie about the end of the world? For people living near the Aral Sea in Central Asia, it’s all too real. Thirty years ago, government planners diverted the rivers that flow into the sea in order to irrigate(provide water for)farmland. As a result, the sea has shrunk to half its original size, stranding ships on dry land. The seawater has tripled in salt content and become polluted, killing all 24 native species of fish.

Similar large-scale efforts to redirect water in other parts of the world have also ended in ecological crisis, according to numerous environmental groups. But many countries continue to wow gold, build massive dams and irrigation systems, even though such projects can create more problems than they fix. Why? People in many parts of the world are desperate for water, and more people will need more wow gold water in the next century.

“Growing populations will worsen problems with water,” says Peter H. Gleick, an environmental scientist at the Pacific Institute for studies in Development, replica rolex, Environment, and Security, a research organization in California. He fears that by the year 2025, as many as onethird of the world’s projected replica rolex 8.3 billion people will suffer from water shortages.

Where Water Goes

Only 2.5 percent of all water on Earth is freshwater, water suitable for drinking and growing food, says Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project in Amherst, Mass. Twothirds of this freshwater is locked in glaciers and ice caps. In fact, only a tiny percentage replica rolex, of freshwater is part of the water cycle, in which water evaporates and rises into the atmosphere, then condenses and falls back to replica rolex Earth as precipitation(rain or snow).

Some precipitation runs off land to lakes and oceans, and some becomes groundwater, water that seeps into the earth. Much of this renewable freshwater ends up in remote places like the Amazon river basin in Brazil, where few people live. In fact, the world’s population has access to only 12,500 cubic kilometers of freshwater—about the amount of water in Lake Superior. And people use half of this amount already. “If water demand continues Final Fantasy XI GIL, to climb rapidly,” says Postel, “there will be severe shortages and damage to the aquatic Final Fantasy XI GIL environment.”

Close to Home

Water woes may seem remote to people living in rich countries like the United States. But Americans could face serious water shortages, too especially in areas that rely on groundwater. Groundwater accumulates in aquifers, layers of sand and gravel that lie between soil and bedrock. (For every liter of surface aion kinah water, more than 90 liters are hidden underground.)Although the United States has large aquifers, farmers, ranchers, and cities are tapping many of them for water faster than nature can replenish it. In northwest Texas, for example, over pumping has shrunk groundwater supplies by 25 percent, according to Postel.

Americans may face even more urgent problems from pollution. Drinking water in the United States is generally safe and meets high standards. Nevertheless, one in five Americans every day unknowingly drinks tap water contaminated with bacteria and chemical wastes, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In Milwaukee, 400,000 people fell ill in 1993 after drinking tap water tainted with cryptosporidium, a microbe aion kinah, that causes fever, diarrhea and vomiting.

The Source

Where do contaminants come from? In developing countries, people dump raw sewage into the same streams and rivers from which they draw water for drinking and cooking; about 250 million people a year get sick from water borne diseases.

In developed countries, manufacturers use 100,000 chemical compounds to make a wide range of products. Toxic chemicals pollute water when released untreated into rivers and lakes. (Certain compounds, such as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, have been banned in the United States.)

But almost everyone contributes to water pollution. People often pour household cleaners, car antifreeze, and paint thinners down the drain; all of these contain hazardous chemicals. Scientists studying water in the San Francisco Bay reported in 1996 that 70 percent of the pollutants could be traced to household waste.

Farmers have been criticized for overusing herbicides and pesticides, chemicals that kill weeds and insects but that pollute water as well. Farmers also use nitrates, nitrogen-rich fertilizer that help plants grow but that can wreak havoc on the environment. Nitrates are swept away by surface runoff to lakes and seas. Too many nitrates “over enrich” these bodies of water, encouraging the buildup of algae, or microscopic plants that live on the surface of the water. Algae deprive the water of oxygen that fish need to survive, at times choking off life in an entire body of water.

What’s the Solution?

Water expert Gleick advocates conservation and local solutions to water-related problems; governments, for instance, would be better off building small-scale dams rather than huge and disruptive projects like the one that ruined the Aral Sea.

“More than 1 billion people worldwide don’t have access to basic clean drinking water,” says Gleick.“There has to be a strong push on the part of everyone—governments and ordinary people—to make sure we have a resource so fundamental to life.”

Early Childhood Education

‘Education To Be More’ was published last August. It was the report of the New Zealand

Government’s Early Childhood Care and Education Working Group. The report argued for enhanced equity (公平 of access and better funding for childcare and early childhood education institutions. Unquestionably, that’s a real need? but since parents don’t normally send children to preschools until the age of three, are we missing out on the most important years of all?

A 13year study of early childhood development at Harvard University has shown that, by the age of three, most children have the potential to understand about 1000 words – most of the language they will use in ordinary conversation for the rest of their lives.

Furthermore, research has shown that while every child is born with wow power leveling a natural curiosity, it can be suppressed dramatically during the second and third years of life. Researchers claim that the human personality is formed during the first two years of life, and during wow power leveling the first three years children learn the basic skills they will use in all their later learning both at home and at school.

Once over the age of three, children continue to expand on existing knowledge of the world. It is generally acknowledged that young people from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds tend to do less well in our education system. That’s observed not just in New Zealand, but also in

Australia, Britain and America. In an attempt to overcome that educational underachievement,anationwide program called ‘Headstart’ was launched in the United States in 1965. A lot of money was poured into it. It took children into preschool institutions at the age of three replica rolex, and was supposed to help the children of poorer families succeed in school.

Despite substantial funding, results have been disappointing. It is thought replica rolex that there are two explanations for this. First, the program began too late. Many children who entered it at the age of

three were already behind their peers in language and measurable intelligence. Second, the parents were not involved. At the end of each day, ‘Headstart’ children returned to the same disadvantaged home environment.

As a result of the growing research evidence of the importance of the first three years of a child’s life and the disappointing results from ‘Headstart’, a pilot program was launched in

Missouri in the US that focused on parents as the child’s first teachers. The ‘Missouri’ program was predicated on research showing that working with the family, rather than bypassing the parents, is the most effective way of helping children get off to the best possible start in life. The fouryear pilot study included 380 families who were about to have their first child and who represented a crosssection of replica rolex, socioeconomic status, age and family configurations (结构. They included singleparent and twoparent families, families in which replica rolex both parents worked, and families with either the mother or father at home. The program involved trained parent educators visiting the parents’ home and working with the parent, or parents, and the child. Information on child development, and guidance on things to look for and expect as the child grows were provided, plus guidance in fostering the child’s intellectual, language, social and motorskill development. Periodic checkups of the child’s educational and sensory development (hearing and vision) were made to detect possible handicaps that interfere with growth and development. Medical problems were referred to professionals.

Parenteducators

made personal visits to homes and monthly group meetings were held with other new parents to share experience and discuss topics of interest. Parent resource centers, located in school buildings, offered learning materials for families and facilities for child.

At the age of three, the children who had been involved in the ‘Missouri’ program were evaluated alongside a crosssection of children selected from the same range of socioeconomic backgrounds and family situations, and also a random sample of children that age. The results were phenomenal. By the age of three, the children in the program were significantly more advanced in language development than their peers, had made greater wow gold, strides in problem solving and other intellectual skills, and were further along in social development. In fact, the average child on the program was performing at the level of the top 15 to 20 per cent of their peers in such things as auditory wow gold comprehension, verbal ability and language ability.

Most important of all, the traditional measures of ‘risk’, such as parents’ age and education, or whether they were a single parent, bore little or no relationship to the measures of achievement

and language development. Children in the program performed equally well regardless of socioeconomic disadvantages. Child abuse was virtually eliminated. The one factor that was found to affect the child’s development was family stress leading to a poor quality of parentchild interaction. That interaction was not necessarily bad in poorer families.

These research findings are exciting. There is growing evidence in New Zealand that children from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds are arriving at school less well developed and that our

school system tends to perpetuate (使永存 that disadvantage. The initiative outlined above could break that cycle of disadvantage. The concept of working with parents maple story mesos, in their homes, or at their place of work, contrasts quite markedly with the report of the Early Childhood maple story mesos Care and Education

Working Group. Their focus is on getting children and mothers access to childcare and institutionalized early childhood education. Education from the age of three to five is undoubtedly vital, but without a similar focus on parent education and on the vital importance of the first three years, some evidence indicates that it will not be enough to overcome educational inequity.