My Rat Race

See Donald Trump Live in Anaheim!

It’s Your Time to Become a Millionaire is organized by the Learning Annex. There will be 72 wealth building classes in 1 weekend, on Saturday and Sunday November 4 and 5. Some people you will see there will be:

• Donald Trump
• George Foreman
• Kareem Abdul Jabbar on Performing Under Pressure
• Mark Burnett on Sales Techniques
• Jean Chatzky on Debt to Wealth
• Jonathan Pond on Finacial Freedom
• and more!

You will learn:

• Why Donald’s buying and you should too!
• Profile of 17 home business you can start NOW.
• Make $$$ in Auctions and Foreclosures.
• Become an eBay Entrepreneur.
• What are the right investments in today’s market?
• Strategies to improve your credit score.
• Answers to all your questions about stocks, bonds, mutual funds, 401Ks, etc.
• Business and networking opportunities galore!
• Real Estate profites with no money down.
• And so much more!
• WIN TONS OF CASH PRIZES!

Register now! Limited VIP Seating, call 1-800-942-7863 or visit the Learning Annex.

Those who blog about real estate may have an opportunity to write for MyHomeThing. They are in search of creative writers to write for their lead generation program and they are very much interested in your creativeness. And it to generate good leads online, creative writing is a talent one should really have. This blog of MyHomeThing wishes to have the viral feel of getting the attention of related websites, news media and other related blogs.

I went for a 2 week vacation recently with my wife and the rest of my family, and it was also an opportunity to get away from work. And during this time, I can still say making money was still in my head and not just spending money on a vacation. And besides, I was nearly broke with airfare alone going across the globe.

My wife has bought for me a book of Gary Sutton, who is Robert Kiyosaki’s legal advisor. I have read earlier the book of Garrett Sutton, ESQ: Own Your Own Corporation and now the book my wife got me was the The ABC’s of Getting Out of Debt by the same author.

Aside from that, a friend of mine, Mike Lopez, has told me during my vacation that Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki has just released a new book: Why We Want You To Be Rich: Two Men, One Message.

I will share my own insights on these books and share them here and how I applied this lessons in my journey out of the rat race.

Everyday, we get spam. In the mail alone, who has not received a letter from a car loan company, home refinancing, mortgage or insurance? In emails, you get the same thing, refinancing, mortgage, car loans, penny stocks and more. Even blog comment spam on this blog has a lot of those. And most of the time, these sites are just interested in conversion and just trying to hard sell to you that they can be annoying.

Now you can’t deny it though, that there will come a time you will need the services of these companies. When you want to buy a new car, you will need a good auto loan company. And all the spam you get can just be overwhelming and are not really explaining very well. They are the attention grabber types that try to convert into a sale right away without explaining enough details.

One good resource I found on loans online is rateGenius. Their website explains many questions people usually ask about in loans and quality information is what I like in a loan company website. So for Auto Refinancing, I would go to rateGenius.

Although this post is not about getting rich, which this blog is all about, earning more money, building business and working your way into being an investor and getting out of the rat race and into the fast track. This post is about a book where the title is 10 Secrets of the Rich, although the title is in another language where the title is 10 Sikreto ng Mayayayaman. This post again is not even about what is the contents of the book, but it is about another issue. The author of this book decided to sell his book online which I personally believe is a good way to market the book. The author hired the services of Sheeromedia, where the designer has claimed that her design was not accepted and was issued a full refund. After which when the official website came out, the site look just like design concept given by the deisgner with just few modifications. I really do not know the nitty gritty details of the story, but using labor of intellectual services of one person and not paying them maybe not the right way to get rich. More details of the story of the website selling the book 10 Sikreto ng Mayayaman can be found on the blog of the designer Gail Del Cruz.

Real Estate is just sometimes plain expensive for the average Joe in America. As some areas may have cheaper houses, the top jobs are also quite lower paying as well. In the more urban areas, as the price of real estate is higher, many people opt to find smaller houses to keep the cost down and many American live in apartments all their life. But with the need to have more material needs and wants, sometimes requires larger living space which not everyone can afford, and this is rented storage space comes in. If you need more space to store many of the important things you treasure and do not want to sell, give, or throw away but fills up your house, you can simply extend your space in rented self storage. While in the early days of building our future, we do not have much money yet to expand our homes to accommodate your treasured things, using self-storage spaces might be the more economical way to keep things. If you live in a area where you believe you need these self-storage spaces but do not know where to find them, you can start with the Self Storage Directory - Moving.bz.

I know as we depart from the rat race, we are moving away from being an employee and being self-employed. And to go into the fast track, we go into owning businesses and investing. And yet here I am again, applying for a new job. I am applying for my 3rd job in the United States, after I came here in July 2004. Still to get started in getting in to the fast track, we all still need money to get by everyday. And my first job here in the US was a Web Designer / Developer from August 2004 to May 2006, where I started at $12/hour and worked my way up to $35,000/year. And I just resigned last may for another job doing the same thing for $45,000/year.

Now design and development of website can just get tiring and boring too, and the more you do it, the better you get at it, and the more you see to move into making websites all your life. The new job I am applying for is an SEO/SEM position. Although it is still work, this moves you more into a career of more consultancy and helps greatly in sales and marketing for any company and experience here will do nothing but help you grow your own business. The job offer has the same salary rate, but with more flexible time and more business related skills can be gained. A new career move but still in the direction of getting into the fast track and out of the rat race.

Many people have been starting to blog for profit, including yours truly. The most common way I believe most bloggers do I adding Google’s Adsense and other Pay Per Click revenue advertising. Although some clicks do not really pay a large amount, some are a few cents as low as $0.01 cent. While I have already experienced a $4 click, and has read about $8 clicks, these are extremely rare. And even if you do have an ad posted on your site that is high paying, the next step will depend on how to get traffic to your site. Although I believe as long as you blog and blog, the traffic just comes in naturally. Somewhat like a snowball effect, this will eventually grow. But it can be tiring posting and posting and not getting paid much.

This is where PayPerPost (http://www.payperpost.com) comes in. If you are a blogger and your PPC ads do not seem to convert well. Might as well add PPP to your blogging. If you or your friend is a blogger, that seems to earn only a few cents in PPC, send them this page, email them, and tell them about PayPerPost.com.

I know there are mixed views of various people about this topic. Simply because people think differently. So I know people that like the 401K and I also know people that do not want to participate in it.

What is the 401K?

I will come up with a very simplified explanation what this is. This is basically an employer-sponsored retirement plan. 401K is actually a section of the Internal Revenue Code that talks about this plan where the money you place in the 401K is tax free. The money you put in your 401K is taken out from your gross income, not from your net. So as many 401K advocates say, 401K is good since you get to save a lot since it is deducted from your gross and is not taxed. This money you put in the 401K are invested in various ways. Through mutual funds, stocks, T-bills, etc. And companies that are 401K brokers that companies hire gives the subscriber the freedom where to invest your money from their list of companies you may invest in.

Will you earn more money with the 401K?

It depends. Since your money is also invested in various forms of investment, these can still lose money as well. Every 401K company does not give any guarantee you will earn more money. All they give is statistical numbers, something like for the past 10 years, 95% of our subscribers had an increase in their 401K funds. Though 95% may be a good number, the longer the time range they mention, the more higher the percentage they may report. Additionally, in giving a statistic with a certain time range, they can mention based on statistics from this year to this year, and excluding the bad years.

How to do the 401K?

As many 401K salespeople explain it. There are several markets you can invest in, some present 3 brackets, other present 6. The present them differently, but as a simplyfied explanation, they split the brackets into the following, the conservative, the agressive, and the somewhat in between. The conservative gives you a slower growth of your money with less probable risk while the agressive gives you faster growth, but also increases your risk of losing money. These 401K salespeople will recommend most of the time to diversify. Put money into each kind so if ever any of them goes down, you still have money growing some place else.

Is the 401K really tax free?

It has no tax on the payments. But it is taxable at the highest rate when you get your 401K retirement money.

Is the 401K and the IRA the same? Is there one better than other?

The IRA is the Individual Retirement Account, also a retirement plan. There are several types of IRAs but just to give you a quick difference of IRA and 401K, 401Ks are taxed when you retire. And the payments you place in the 401K are tax free. In the IRA, you are taxed in the money you place in the IRA but is tax free in the money you get when you retire. This may be an over simplified explanation, but you can do your own research about this. Some say the 401K is better since you are not tax in the money you place in it, while others say, IRA is better since you are not tax in the money you will get from it. I believe this is more of a personal preference. If you need money everyday, and it on a tight budget on a daily basis and you envision your future to have earned more money and thus more comfort, you may want the 401K. If you have more money today to spend, and is more than enough in daily expenses and you see your future having no money or money may be a problem and you highly depend on it, you may want to do the IRA instead.

Why not to 401K?

Just by looking at the people that like the 401K and those that do not like the 401K, most of the people that like the 401K are the poor and middle class. And the people that do not like the 401K are the rich and affluent. Why? Because the rich know how to make money. And the money they might have used in the 401K could have made more money if they invested it elsewhere. While the poor and middle class are usually the people with an everyday job and picture themselves that way for the rest of their life and everyday seems impossible for them to do a business or study investing, are looking for ways to make more money the easy way without thinking. As many investors say, why have the 401K invest my money, I would rather invest it myself. Bottomline is, the money you into 401K can generate more money if invested outside the 401K. And the only issue is, do you know how to do this?

Did I sign up for the 401K?

I am one of the people that believes that I can make more money outside the 401K. But I still signed up for it. It is not really a conflicting belief, but with my current situation, I am still in my learning curve in understanding investing in the stock market, in real estate and I am also targeting the gas/oil industry. Right now I am still an employee and is self-employed as well. I am still in the works of building more business that does not require me much time to work but still earn more money. I signed up in the 401K with just a little percentage of my salary, to help in my retirement, while I am still increasing my financial knowledge so at least my money still went somewhere, rather than putting it in the bank. The funds inside the 401K is in a compound interest that banks do not offer. You can also do loans from the 401K in the future, which can be used for future real estate investments which is one of my interest. So I kept my 401K investment conservative as I plan for my bigger business and investment plans while I am still in the process of learning more financial knowledge. I have been attending seminars and reading books and is planning in learning more about business and investments through enrolling in the:

Although Robert Kiyoski has told many time that there is something wrong with the educational system, he never adviced not to go to school. School is still good, and what’s wrong with it is what people learn from school. Learning is a continuous process, and everytime you learn more, you always find out there is even a lot more to learn. And to make it big, investing in financial knowledge is important. And to invest in financial knowledge, you can get these in short term trainings and seminars, or you can get these from associates or bachelor degrees. Although the cost of education can be high price, this is where an education loan comes in. You can approach several companies like private student loans from Act Education Loans. As discussed in my previous post about good debt and bad dept, so what is an education loan? A Good debt of bad debt? The answer lies in what you will do with your education. If you go to school and learn and make the most out of what you have learn to earn more, I guess an education loan is a good debt. But if you went to college without knowing why you took a certain course, and just enrolled. And was able to graduate without understanding a thing, then your student load will be a bad debt.