In the winter of 2013 while searching for business opportunities (like I always am) an idea came to. I wanted to start something new and since I had been out of the CEO seat for a couple of years, I really wanted to make a splash. I was looking for a BIG idea, and guess what, I found it!
J. Candace Covington
I was in my car driving on the freeway thinking very hard about new business ventures (I like to go out for a drive to think). Then it hit me, initially the idea I had was doing something like a dating website/app but specifically for the purpose of finding a roommate. BING, lightbulb. I immediately called some people I respect to get their opinion of my idea, one of those people was my friend and now business partner J. Candace Covington. She loved the idea and helped me vet it out more adding some innovation to the mix by adding the idea of combing background and credit checking to the profiling system giving us a complete one-stop-shop for a “rooommate-finding/vetting” system. It was gold, now the next step was to see if someone had created this before us.
Watch the Roommatefax promo video by clicking this Image now!
My initial reaction was that someone would have had thought of this before because it was so simple and right in front of us. “Who wouldn’t use this?” I kept asking myself that over and over again. Knowing the pain we have all gone through living with a bad roommate(s) or renting a place to a bad tenant(s), I would have paid hundreds or thousands to avoid that painful process. So, we starting researching, and sure enough, no one had done it yet! That’s the crazy thing about a great idea, some descent ideas become great simply because no one has done it yet. Have you ever thought of an invention or business and then saw your idea on an infomercial years later? That’s happened to me before, and more than once too. If you are anything like me, you are a methodical person with a dash of crazy. You see, to run with an idea and try build a company around it is no easy feat. Although this is not my first rodeo when it comes to start-up’s the environment changes daily, especially if you’re in Tech. What I have learned over the years is that some can get lucky once, rarely do they get lucky twice, and you pull it off a third time, it’s not luck, it’s a learned skill and habitual.
Jim Hamerly Ph.D.
So, knowing we had a solid idea, and no one else was doing it, we ran with it. Filed all the paperwork, raised a little seed money, wrote a business plan and starting building a team. We needed advisors, a development team, an attorney, and most importantly, we were going to need some investors! The amount of work and sweat equity that go in to the beginning stages of a company are dizzying, and most people can’t imagine doing it because the name of the game is work for free and ask a lot of people for help your first year, and then maybe you will get a shot at the big time. Remember that 95% of small business fail, and you don’t even want to know the percentage rate for start-up ventures! I eventually brought Dr. Jim Hamerly the idea. Jim started the entrepreneurs track at the CSUSM (my Alma Matter) and helped “reform” the school of business there. He was the former VP of AOL Time Warner and former VP of Netscape (He has so many big accomplishments, I could write a blog about it 😉 )I met him while I was giving a lecture the CSUSM Entrepreneurs society 4 years ago. We quickly became friends and shared many of the same business philosophies. I would run ideas by him, but I had never seen him as excited as he was when I ran the Roommatefax.com idea by him. I immediately asked him to be our lead advisor to the company and he accepted.
Eric D. Morton
Armed with a small team and a little bit of capital, we picked up an attorney advisor Eric Morton. We realized quickly that if we were going to make this happen in a big way we would need to team up with a law firm that could advise us on any problems that could arise in the future. Although I have owned and operated several companies, we quickly learned that if one day we were to go public there were many things that needed to be taken into consideration and that it is best to tackle those things early on. Eric Morton has played an integral part in helping us set up the business properly and filing our trademarks and copyrights to protect the hard work that everyone has put forth to get this project going along with user agreements among other necessary documents.
Prakash Chegu
We had spent countless hours researching the market place and now we knew what we needed to have to make us stand out from rest. The next step proved to be the most difficult. Who was going to help make this dream a reality? We knew time was not on our side but it was extremely important that we picked the right development team to build the Roommatefax site and app. We began a checklist of things that we were looking for in a development team and began interviewing teams across the country. Some of the criteria most important to us included the development team believing in the idea (like it was their own), be in the United States, willing to work closely with us and have successfully launched websites and apps on all platforms. So after meeting with several firms, we were introduced to Prakash Chegu. Prakash was really excited about the project, and met all the criteria and best of all, he was local and really easy to work with. We did some wire frames, cut a couple checks, and the development of our dream commenced.
Shaun Briggs
Finally we were going to need some awesome design work for the company. My good friend Shaun Briggsanswered the call. I have known Shaun for over 6 years now and his design work is so good, that as a designer myself I feel like I stand in his shadow. I was always told by my mentor that you should look for people better than you, and then work with them. In a strange turn of events, it turned out that Shaun actually used to work with Prakash 10 years ago when he was running his brokerage firm in San Diego, that was fate, and in the start-up phase of a company, you need all the help and good luck you can get! Its been a year and a half since we started out on this mission and a lot of blood sweat and tears have gone into this project. And I knew this was going to be a lot of work putting all the pieces together. Although it is nice to know that we are on the home stretch of the development process, the real hard work is about to begin. So where are we at now? We are currently seeking investors while getting ready to close out our seed round of funding that will continue until about mid-late July. Then we plan on launching our beta versions of the site and app (on IOS and Android) by late summer. Currently we have a profile on crowdfunder.comwhere we can seek investors from friends, family, and supporters of us. We know we are in the toughest phase of the start-up process and are ready to take it on. So if you or anyone you know is interested in getting involved in our company as an advisor, investor or member of the team, please get in touch with us here.
Thank you so much for all the love and support. We are looking forward to helping a lot of people with our idea, and truly believe it will make the world a better place! -Steve Wolf
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Turning 30 isn’t going to be all that bad. I’m not dreading it, I am embracing it. There are so many great people who had success after 30.
The Entertainment Industry.
The Oprah Winfrey show didn’t debut until she was 32. Sylvester Stallone didn’t make Rocky until he was 30, and was in a porno to make ends meet while shopping the script around. Dick Van Dyke and Gene Hackman didn’t get their first major roles until their mid-thirties. More recently, The entertainment industry recognized Jon Hamm, J.K. Rowling and Tina Fay’s talent all after they hit 30. Vincent Van Gogh had his first art exhibition at 32.
Business.
Suze Orman started out as a waitress and held that job until age 30. And she didn’t publish her first financial book until age 44. Nowadays, she’s sittin’ pretty as one of the most-trusted voices in the world of personal finance. If Ray Kroc had quit pushing the ideas of serving a billion Big Macs world-wide, McDonalds wouldn’t exist. If he quit trying before the age of 52, he never would have created one of America’s best-known restaurant empires. He kept at, working day in and day out at his restaurant until he died. While Dave Ramsey thought he’d figured things out in his 20s with his $4 million real estate portfolio, he lost it all by the time he hit 30. A few years later, he found his passion in financial counseling, and today his books and radio show have millions of dedicated fans.
When it comes right down to it, Age really is just a number. I believe I am going to live to 100 anyway so who cares, Im 20 years from my half way point with so much life to live. I get sad when I come across people who have thrown in towel because they feel like they missed their window or something in their 20’s. It’s so far from the truth.
Sure, if I could go back, I would have made some different goals knowing what I know now. Who wouldn’t? Making a million dollars seemed really cool at 22 but I never understood or realized all of the liability and responsibility that comes with that. I would write that goal much differently now, something like “make enough money so I don’t ever have to be in debt or depend on anyone to support myself having enough left over to help friends, family, and people in need when possible.” Despite all of my shortcomings, or what I should or shouldn’t have done, the goal now is to create enough abundance to be happy and get my time back.
Regardless of what you have or haven’t accomplished, it’s not over. The journey truly is just beginning. I would take years of experience over raw talent and crazy ambition most of the time these days. I sacrificed a lot of relationships in my 20’s chasing a dollar and losing sight many times about what was really important. The last 3 years of my life have been the most gratifying years so far and they are nowhere near what I set out to do 10 years ago. In fact, if you told me 10 years earlier where I would be now, I would have gotten upset, and depressed because the only way that I measured success was by the size of my bank account, and if what ever life you told me I would have had didn’t involve me being filthy rich, I would have gone a different direction.
So what now. Where do we go from here.
Well I know what I am going to do. They’re wont be all that much of a change for me. I am well on my way to doing some incredible things in my life. I have great business opportunities that I have started in the last year. The first one being my tech start-up (Roommatefax.com) and the second has been learning to trade the FOREX market. As far as hobbies go, I have always maintained a work-hard-play hard mentality, So I picked up skydiving 2 years ago as well as training MMA (Krav Maga). I am in the best shape that I have ever been in my life. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I eat healthy and I exercise regularly.
After living a little here on earth for a little while, I have come to understand some things about life. Most of which I recently published in my latest book The Young Entrepreneurs Guide To Life.I just want to live my life to the fullest. I want to experience and see as much as this world has to offer while I am alive and kicking. I will never stop seeking. To me, business is just another adventure. I have had jobs here and there but they were always stepping-stones to get me to a place where I would take my life back, live it how I wanted too. As an entrepreneur, I get bored and need to switch projects it seems about every 2 years. This is very bad for job security, but great if you love starting new things.
Money comes and goes. I have learned that it is a tool, that’s all, it’s only emotional if you don’t have enough of it. If getting it ruins your relationships, you’re doing it wrong. I’m looking forward to enjoying what I have now. The potential of marriage, kids one day soon. Seeing places in the world I have never been too and accomplishing things to better myself physically, spiritually, and in business. These are all things that I am looking forward too.
So all in all, turning 30 is going to be great. I have done a lot of big things in my 20’s. I failed in some areas, and absolutely dominated in others, these days I just want to enjoy the journey, and go for happy instead of being right or “winning.” Remember that the only thing to dread or fear comes from your own inability to accept the reality of your situation good or bad, and then doing something to better it or make it worse.
Go lose 10 lbs if it will make you feel better. Take a trip to South East Asia if you have never been. Buy a nice car if you have never had one before, but just be real about it. Honor those who love and support you. Remember where you came from and all the shit you have been through to get to where you are. Don’t lose perspective, gain it, be a wolf, go hard, and most importantly follow your heart. Fuck what society says or thinks you should do some random age, I’m trying to live more and more like a kid the older I get. I will never conform, and no matter how up and down the roller coaster of life takes me. I choose to have fun and a good attitude about everything as much as possible regardless of what type of shit gets flung at me. Maybe you should too! Stop worrying and start living.
So if you’re approaching 30, and you have some anxiety, don’t worry, there is plenty of life to live and I hope I have alleviated some of the worry and concern with this post!
Being in debt sucks, you should get out of it. America is HIGH on credit cards, loans and just living way beyond our means in general. It’s got to stop because it’s simply a vicious cycle of madness, and will only end if you make the personal choice to do it in your own life.
“When you get in debt you become a slave.” -Andrew Jackson
It has been a long time coming for writing a blog on this topic. I write a lot about life-style and ways to accumulate wealth, but there is another side to the wealth coin and that side is DEBT. We all know what it is because at one time or another we have all been in it. For most people I meet, being in debt is a part of everyday American life that 99% of Americans live in day in day out. The other 1% owns all the wealth, and we can’t get to where they are because they are the ones lending the money 🙂 Imagine if we lived in a world where you couldn’t get a credit card or a loan. Think of how different the world would be, how much stress would be lifted off of you or your loved ones. What if you woke up tomorrow and you were magically at $0. How would that change your life? Here in America, we start getting credit card offers weeks before we turn 18 years old, with banks enticing you with instant gratification telling you to buy now and worry later. Sadly it has become a way of life here in the U.S. and I believe it will ultimately lead to our downfall. The powers that be do an incredible job keeping us in a constant state of denial, and for good reason too, because it’s hard to sell you on the idea of being ok with getting in to debt if they actually told you what you were really getting yourself in to.
Let me throw a couple of stats at you real quick on the US debt situation, then we will get in to your shit! * As of April 1, 2014, the official debt of the United States government is $17.6 trillion ($17,578,141,920,036).This amounts to:
$143,543 for every household in the U.S.
103% of the U.S. gross domestic product.
559% of annual federal revenues.
$55,372 for every person living in the U.S. (not including Americans Individual’s personal debt which is indicated below.)
U.S. household consumer debt profile:
Average credit card debt: $15,191
Average mortgage debt: $154,365
Average student loan debt: $33,607
James Quin from financialscense.com writes: “The average hard-working, taxpaying American has been enslaved in debt of such proportions that they will never be able pay it off. Your share of the $17.6 trillion National Debt is now $55,372, and growing by $4,500 per year. Your share of the future unfunded liabilities, created by the people you elected, is approximately $350,000. This crushing burden is in addition to the $13.8 trillion of mortgage, credit card, student loan, and auto loan debt Americans have accumulated in the last three decades of delusion. Forty percent of all credit card users do not pay-off their credit card every month and carry an average balance of $16,000 at an average interest rate of 15%. Good to see the Wall Street banks passing along some of their 0% borrowing windfall to their “customers”. ” So what does this all mean? Well it’s simple, as a country we’re F*&%ed. As an individual, you may have a chance for redemption if you choose to take the hard road and opt out of the vicious cycle, but it won’t be easy. In this blog, I am going to share with you some of the key ideological changes I underwent as well as the actions that I took to get my debt managed, and eventually paid the f%^& off. If you do exactly what I tell you to do in this blog, you will be well on your way to getting out of debt for GOOD! I will explain how to cut your interest rates in 1/2 if not more. Here are the steps.
1. Stop the bleeding – Ok, if you are serious about doing this, it’s time to make some hard decisions. I don’t mean like you need to tighten your belt a bit and cut back a little, I’ll equate this to a obesely overweight person that needs their stomach stapled, and triple by-pass heart surgery to stay alive. This means fire sale time. You go through your house and collect everything of any value that you don’t use. My indicator is: unless it’s a seasonal item like a snowboard, if it hasn’t been used for 6 months, sell it, thrown it out or give it to goodwill for a tax credit. Anything you own two of needs to be reduced to only one, after all, why do you need 2 anyway? This includes big ticket items like cars, motorcycles etc. Next you need to look through your bank statement and find any subscriptions or monthly reoccurring charges that you don’t use on a regular basis. For example, expensive gym memberships, magazine subscriptions etc. Be vigilant, we are talking about things you don’t absolutely need, if you need your gym membership, I”l tell you how to save on that later on, but for now, just follow the directions. If your a person like my mom who needs to hold on to everything, than you need a close friend to help you through the process like a drug addict needs a sponsor to keep them in check, you can’t be trusted.
2. Reality Check – Time to get out of denial and face the truth. Gather all the statements of debts you have. College loans, car loans, credit cards, mortgages etc. Then start an excel spreadsheet to lay it all out. I’ve included the one I used that gave me a clear picture of what I owed and the percentage rates I was paying. (StevenEwolf.com Debt Worksheet). Once we have it all laid out on paper we have “THE NUMBER” meaning the price you will have to pay for freedom. For me that number was $160,000 in 2010, and I got it under control without a bankruptcy or credit help bullshit company. It can be done, if I can do it, you can too.
3.Budget time – Here is where you sit down with your loved one, or by yourself if your single and simply find out how much you are making and how much you are spending. To get an idea of this, I strongly suggest you use a budget program like Mint.com. I used mint.com and still use today to mange my income, expenses and investments, it does all that for you in one simple program by collecting all your financial data and putting it in one easy place for you to see and manage. It will give you a snap shop of your current cash vs. debt as well as up to date information about every asset and liability you have. It will also allow you to create a budget based on your income so you can track and see exactly how much you are spending and what you are spending it (or wasting it) on. This can only be done once you figure out what your income is. If you are like me, and never had a constant pay check, this will give you data collected over a period of time to help you balance out your income as you receive it.
4. Savings Strategy – What is savings you ask, well that’s money that you don’t spend, something that is not a familiar practice to my generation. Here is what it needs to look like, I’ll give you an example for an income of $5,000 per month. (I adopted this practice from the book The Richest Man in Babylon & Secrets of the Millionaire Mind and customized it to fit my needs to get out of debt and build wealth)
*****Note, a tax savings account is necessary if you are a 1099 guy like me, if not don’t worry about, the government steals it from you already every pay period at your W-2 job. So for the sake of this example Red will indicate W-2 Person, and Green will indicate 1099 person.
50% of whats left after taxes ($2,000)($2500) Goes in to you spending budget. This is to be used to pay the mortgage/rent, gas utilities, car payment, food etc.
20% Goes in to savings.($800)($1,000) // This is money that you will invest in to something later, but don’t worry about that just yet because you don’t have any money yet, so just save it and if you are in serious debt, all of this money will go to pay off debt starting with high interest credit cards and loans 🙂
10% Goes in to the “emergency/big ticket item fund”($400)($500) // This is money for a new car or a trip, something you may want but don’t necessarily need so if shit hits the fan you can use the cash to get you out of a pickle, but the hawaii trip is not gonna happen this year as a result of it.
10% Goes in to the “Play” fund ($400)($500) // This is your money to blow on what ever you want.
10% Goes in to the “Charity/Education Fund”($400)($500)
4. Budget Review – By following the example above you easily get a hold on your own personal spending, not lets cut some more monthly costs. Time to sit down, look at everything you decided to keep: memberships, subscriptions etc. If they don’t fit in to your budget, you need to cut back even more. It is however worth calling all of the entities and seeing if you can reduce the membership costs. I called my gym, they cut my membership rate in half, then I called some magazine I subscribed to, they gave me a year free, then the cable company, then my cell phone provider and so on. By the time I was done calling every single entity that I had a subscription with, I managed to hang on to one or two things I would have had to get rid of by just calling them and asking for a discount. Once you have accomplished getting this all together and knowing that you are at least not going negative every month, we can go to the next step.
5. The Credit Card Shuffle – Ok let do some plastic surgery. First pull out that debt sheet that you have downloaded from above. Remember the one where you wrote down the total amounts you owe. Ok, now pull out all of your credit cards and start calling each one, here is what you need to find out, and do this exactly like I tell you to here!
1. Call the CC company and find out what you actual rate is on the card.
2. If you have balanced transferred money or have a promotional rate of some kind, find out the rate and when the promotional rate ends and then indicate it on the sheet just like the example I have set out.
3. Ask the customer service agent if they can lower your rate. If they say no, ask them if they can waive this months interest charges as a courtesy. Most companies will do this at least once per year.
4. Ask them if they have any promotions on Balance transfers, don’t do it yet just find out if they do. (It’s usually 0% for 6-12 months or 4.99% for 18 months. They will charge you between 2%-5% to move the money)
5. Repeat this step until you have called every single one of your credit cards and recorded the information on the sheet provided. Now that you have an idea of how badly you are being raped by finance charges, we can start the shuffle. Looking at all of your existing credit left on cards, figure out if it would make sense to transfer balances to cards that have room. Take in to consideration that it will cost you money to move the money, so if the benefits of savings don’t outweigh the costs to move the money or you simply don’t have enough credit left, you will have to choose another option. The main idea is to try to get any credit card balance to 0% or as close to 0% as possible. Some of you may still have good credit if that’s the case, use the following method, if not, read on, there is options for you. If you can swing, pay your highest APR% cards off immediately, meaning any card that only a couple hundred bucks or something on it, just pay it and check that one-off the list.
If you have a good credit score or are a home owner:
1. Ask each CC company to raise your line of credit, explain that you need the credit for business travel.
2. Try to move all of the balances ton ONE card so it’s easily manageable and at the lowest rate. If you have to spread this out over 2 cards, do it, but make sure it makes sense.
3. If you weren’t able to get the CC companies to extend you more credit, try to get a personal consolidation loan. I used one of their and it drastically helped me get out of debt faster. The best company with the lowest rates is Lending Club. Lending club will beat any other personal loan service or big bank on unsecured debt consolidation loans. If you do this, you can get a secured loan for 3 years that can be paid off early with no pre-payment penalty. Otherwise, try a HELOC on your home or a refinance to wrap the debt in the equity if you can do it. If your debt is only a couple thousand it may be a good idea of doing a “used-car refinance loan” and wrapping some of the debt in to that if you have some equity in a vehicle.
If you have bad credit or have no home.
1. See what you can do to move balances around to 0%. If the CC companies won’t extend you credit then try the personal loan from Lending Club like I mentioned above. They still have some great rates with people who have below Prime credit scores.
2. Get a copy of your credit report and find out exactly what you have going against you that is affecting your score.
3. If you can’t get more credit to move balances, and you can’t get a personal loan that makes sense it’s time to start playing dirty with your creditors. The following advice is the last option that you will before you have to start looking at bankruptcy as a viable option. (I will not be covering bankruptcy in this blog because if your situation is that bad, you need to get in touch with an attorney and discuss your options.)
4. Credit card consolidation companies are bullshit. There is nothing that they can do for you that you cannot call your credit card company do yourself. They basically charge you money to “go to bat for you” but what they are really doing is serving as a middle man between you and the CC company and make a little money off of your hard ship. I’ll share my story explaining below at the end of the blog.
6. Sticking to the plan no matter what – The hardest thing that you will encounter when trying to follow these steps is the feeling that there is no end in sight. That you feel so far away from $0 that you want to give up or just say F%^&* it. Understand that it was that exact attitude and lack of discipline and knowledge that got you in to this situation to begin with. In fact, you have probably spent years getting your self in to this situation, so don’t think that this is going to get fixed over night.
What I am proposing here is a long-term and effective strategy to recognize and asses the problem, reconcile the damage done, and then install a system of ideological principles to live by. Taking all of the actions I have laid out here is a start but the ultimate idea here is that you change your mindset, and that you do it long-term because if you use what I gave you here to get out of debt just to do it all over again that we have failed. So, be brave, be sturdy, and most of all, find some gratitude and accomplishment in the fact that you are doing something about it. Just that is a huge step that you should be proud of.
Summary and a Personal Story.
Me in Bali living the life of my dreams. You can to!!!!
As I indicated before, this guide isn’t something I thought up last night, this knowledge comes from years of experience going through this myself. I have been through some very scary times, and if I could, I would love to help you avoid some of those pit falls in life. When the market turned in 2008 I went from owning a house, with a brand new BMW paid with cash to $160,000 in debt ducking creditors and conducting a fire sale with any assets I had left to try and cover the losses. I didn’t do it all correctly and I wish I had seen a blog like this one to help me out of that horrible situation. As my good friend Rob Guth says “ask me how I know?” I love the saying because it comes from experience, and it the experience of the good and bad that has allowed me to learn from my mistakes and come back from some dark times with hope and re-energized spirit to not only continue on when things go south, but to always have hope that tomorrow is a new chance an opportunity to turns things around if they not going well, or continue to rise if they are.
I hope that you take what I wrote here to heart because these nuggets of information have cost me years of my life and hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain. Learn from it, apply it, and execute it in your own life and enjoy years of time and lots of money saved because you were wiser that I was to look. If this blog speaks to you, share it the information with your friends, family and people you care about. If you have questions, comments, concerns, feel free to post in the comments section or contact me via the contact page.
In 2012 while vacationing in Bali I was looking for additional ways to make income while I was traveling abroad. After looking at all kinds of different money making opportunities that could be done online I landed on FOREX trading.
So what is FOREX?
The Forex (Short for foreign exchange) market is the market in which world currencies are traded. The forex market is the largest, most liquid market in the world with an average traded value that exceeds $1.9 trillion per day and includes all of the currencies in the world. There is no central marketplace for currency exchange; trade is conducted over the counter. The forex market is open 24 hours a day, five days a week and currencies are traded worldwide among the major financial centers of London, New York, Tokyo, Zürich, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Singapore, Paris and Sydney. The forex is the largest market in the world in terms of the total cash value traded, and any person, firm or country may participate in this market. The greatest part about it is that it is truly a recession proof way to make money because it is never based on any one country’s economy. With so much cash going through the market each day, becoming profitable based off a conservative approach is not all that hard to do. It is also much more stable of a market and in a lot of ways more predictable that the stock or futures market once you learn the basics.
Sounds Complicated, how do I get involved and not lose money?
If you are anything like I was, I didn’t know a thing about FOREX trading and am not a math or numbers guy at all! I had a preconceived notion about the Forex market. All I ever had experienced about Stocks, bonds, futures, commodities or FOREX was that there was some really smart people that worked on Wallstreet who understood how all this stuff works and that in order to not get slaughtered in the market you must give these people your money and they some how make you money with the money you invest minus their commission of course. When I was 23 I had about $50,000 in the market being managed by Smith Barney. When the economy bottomed out in 2008, my bank roll was decimated by about 75%. I pulled the rest of my money out to cover losses on other real estate investment deals that had gone bad. So all in all, my experience was horrible to say the least. I told myself back then, that I was never going to give my money to someone else like that ever again and just trust that they were going to manage it like I would. Sure they may be smarter than me at investing in domestic markets than I am and I wasn’t personally about to go learn how to be a day trader, but I always believed there had to be some happy medium where I could conservatively invest, control and manage the money I put in to anything hoping for the best return.I found this in the FOREX market.
So how did I get involved and not get slaughtered?
Now this is the million dollar question because if you look on the internet and google FOREX, you find all kinds of crazy stuff about the market ranging from the “follow my system and be a millionaire in a week” – guy to the horror stories of the person who funded their account with 100K not knowing what they were doing and lost it all or most of it. I was extremely skeptical myself and I went looking for a person, school, formula or mentor to help me make some sense of all of this and what I found was amazing.
I live in San Diego, so I was looking for something local. I found a school called the FX365i Institute that was known mostly for it’s ability to teach FOREX trading online. They were teaching people from all walks of life the discipline and proper education to becoming a successful trader. I went in to the school (because it was local to me) to sit in for an orientation. Much to my surprise, these guys weren’t selling some get rich quick scam. More importantly they were speaking from experience explaining that the method they teach is not typical, instead it’s what they call the “Un-cola” meaning that what they teach is the direct opposite of what can commonly be found at any other Forex trading school online or in a physical classroom. They told me that I could physically come in to the trading floor every morning or just log on to the webinar, it was up to me, but the tuition gave me both.
By the end of the presentation I was sold, but before I spent my hard earned cash on the course to the tune of $4,500 I wanted to see some success stories and I wasn’t looking for the guys who were in the 30’s with a ivy league education who were finding success in the Forex market, I was looking for the average Joe’s who were plumbers and auto mechanics by trade and successfully applied the education from the FX365i school in to their trading strategy and were winning.
So I showed up on a tuesday morning at 5AM PST time when they started a normal trading day and what I found was a classroom full of people that were a hodgepodge of young and old from all walks of life that were figuring this thing out. Some had been trading for up to 4 years with the school and some as new as 1 month, but what they all had in common was that they were producing more positive trades than negative rendering them a profit and more importantly a skill set the will eventually lead them away from their day jobs and to a life of freedom and early retirement.
I signed up the very next day, gladly paid the $4,500 tuition and was on my way to pro-trader freedom.
Since then, I have been trading with the Fx365i Institute for about 6 months, my account in the Black, I’ve been trading real money in small lot sizes for about half that time and I couldn’t be anymore happy with the results. When I go off traveling it’s no problem either because I just tune in to the live webinars every morning and trade with the class from anywhere in the world. I’m never alone in this which is very important because the market can be intimidating at times and thats why I really like the hand-holding process that the FX365i Institute has adopted in taking a new student from not knowing the first thing about trading currencies to a pro-trader in a year that can live off the profit he or she is making in the Forex market.
In fact I have had so much fun and success with theses guys that I want to begin to share it with the world so other people can have the same experience that I have had. A way to financial freedom and abundance through the FOREX market.
So if you are interested in finding out more about FOREX, or how to become a student at the FX365i Institute, click the button below the video to find out more.
In the winter of 2013 while searching for business opportunities (like I always am) an idea came to. I wanted to start something new and since I had been out of the CEO seat for a couple of years, I really wanted to make a splash. I was looking for a BIG idea, and guess what, I found it!
44. Nowadays, she’s sittin’ pretty as one of the most-trusted voices in the world of personal finance. If Ray Kroc had quit pushing the ideas of serving a billion Big Macs world-wide, McDonalds wouldn’t exist. If he quit trying before the age of 52, he never would have created one of America’s best-known restaurant empires. He kept at, working day in and day out at his restaurant until he died. While Dave Ramsey thought he’d figured things out in his 20s with his $4 million real estate portfolio, he lost it all by the time he hit 30. A few years later, he found his passion in financial counseling, and today his books and radio show have millions of dedicated fans.
The greatest part about it is that it is truly a recession proof way to make money because it is never based on any one country’s economy. With so much cash going through the market each day, becoming profitable based off a conservative approach is not all that hard to do. It is also much more stable of a market and in a lot of ways more predictable that the stock or futures market once you learn the basics.