Do you know how to build financial freedom? Do you know what financial freedom is?

Financial freedom is the ability to go about your life, doing what you want to do, without having to worry about money. Sounds cool and maybe too good to be true, right?

Well, it is true because I know a few people who have it. I have blogged a lot about Loral Langemeier and I believe she has financial freedom. Some other people I follow that you may have heard of, like Mike Dillard, Bob Proctor, and Joe Vitale, also have financial freedom. Closer to what I’m doing, Reid Nelson and Dave Johnson are high-ranking Nikken distributors who have achieved it.

I think that you and I should also be on that list, don’t you?

I quit my job 3 weeks ago today, totally voluntary, so that I could focus on building my own businesses. My primary business is with Nikken, a research company originally from Japan, that offers very unique technologies to help people feel better without having to rely so heavily on drugs and surgery. My goal is to build a team that cares enough about other people to want to offer alternatives for staying healthy,  building income, and establish their own financial independence.

I had some one-on-one time recently with Reid Nelson, one of the people I mentioned above, about what he sees as our real business. He doesn’t see Nikken and network marketing as selling. Instead he describes it as building distribution networks for some amazing products and our income is earned by moving product through those networks. I have to agree with him. I can’t remember the last time that I sold any product and I still get a check every month. I have a website that sells product for me and I get rebates from the product that I buy for my own use. The people on my team buy product for themselves and I make some income from that as well. It’s really a very useful way to look at it.

If this sounds interesting to you, please leave me a comment or contact me through my contact page. I can also be reached through my product site at www.getmywellness.com where you can also see those amazing Nikken wellness products I mentioned.

Wayne Woodworth
Building financial independence through distribution networks

I was looking for something to listen to and came across Robert Kiyosaki‘s audio book – Increase Your Financial IQ. It was published in March 2008 and has some very good, current information. I highly recommend it. There was some important information in the first chapter that I want to share here.

In 1971 President Nixon took the US off the gold standard, which changed how our money works. Prior to 1971, the dollar was based on gold, which has intrinsic value. To save money was equal to saving gold, so it made sense to save money for retirement or college because it would hold value.

Since 1971, the dollar is no longer money because it doesn’t have any real value backing it. It is now a currency. The word “currency” comes from the same root as “current”, like an electric current or air current. Currents require movement for them to exist. Likewise, a currency requires movement for it to maintain value.  As you can see from our current economy, as the movement of the dollar slows, the value of the dollar decreases and the economy suffers.

Historically, all currencies eventually go to zero.

Are you listening to those financial advisers who are telling people that they need to reduce their spending, pay off debt, and save for the future? If the value of our currency does go to zero, what will your savings be worth?

So, what do you do? How do you secure your financial future? I’m not a financial adviser, so I can’t tell you what to do. I can tell you what I’m doing though.

First, I’m listening to people like Robert Kiyosaki, Donald Trump,  Bob Proctor, and Loral Langemeier. They teach that a job is a lousy way to make money. Kiyosaki, in Rich Dad Poor Dad, said that a job is a good place to learn a new skill, then move one once it has been learned. The thing I like about these teachers is that they preach what they practice. They look for new sources of income and then use that income to buy more assets that generate even more income, and that is what they teach others to do.

Loral Langemeier, in her Millionaire Maker books and Cash Machine Workshops, teaches people how to build a business as an asset, and that’s what I am doing. To be an asset, the business has to generate a sustainable income. I am building my business in network marketing and affiliate marketing which means that I generate income by promoting products from other companies. That allows me to quickly start making money without the up-front costs of developing a new product.

Once I have a business that produces a steady stream of income, I can take that income to buy more assets that then generate more income. Those assets can be investments in other businesses, real estate, gold, gas, oil, or anything else that has a value and an income stream.

This plan doesn’t mean that you have to live without comforts. In Increase Your Financial IQ, Kiyosaki gives an example of how he bought an expensive luxury car.  He took some money out from one of his assets and invested it so that it would make more money. He gave instructions to the person who managed the investment to let him know when it had increased to the point where he could afford the car, pay the fees for managing the investment, and still have the original value of the asset left over. It took some time to accomplish it, but the car was purchased without any money from his own pocket or by decreasing his net worth. That’s a pretty cool deal, huh?

To summarize, the dollar is a currency and all currencies throughout history have eventually failed. To keep our currency alive and maintain it’s value, it has to flow, which means that saving it in a bank account isn’t the right thing to do. A better way to prepare for your future is to convert your money to assets that maintain their value and generate an income of their own. One such asset is a properly structured business, which in my case is in network marketing.

Just as a reminder, I am NOT a financial adviser. Go check out the books by Robert Kiyosaki, Donald Trump, and Loral Langemeier then find a good financial planner to help you decide what is best for you. Ask your financial planner if he or she is wealthy and if he or she got that way by doing what they are advising you to do. If they aren’t, then find another planner.

Wayne Woodworth
Network Marketing Entrepreneur

If your business doesn’t have a business plan then it is in your best interest to create one.

I heard about a study recently of 1600 businesses conducted over a 25 year period about how they used business plans. 70% of the businesses surveyed had no written or verbal plan of any kind, 27% of them had only verbal goals, and only 3% of them had their plan written down. What you need to know is that 98% of all the wealth in those 1600 companies was held by those 3% that had written goals.

Do you see how important it is to have your plan written down?

There are many reasons why a written plan is so effective. One reason is that the process of writing down your business goals actually forces you to think about them and clarify them. You have to know what they are so that you can write them down.

A written plan also gives you a place to go to reset your focus. Flesh out your plan with the specific actions that you are going to do to achieve your goals. Also keep your plan in a place where everyone involved in your business can see it and refer to it. It becomes the document that guides everyone’s actions and keeps everyone on track to accomplish your business goals.

Another way that a written plan can help your business is when you talk to potential partners and/or investors. A business with a written plan will appear much more professional than a business with no plan or just a verbal one.

If you would like to know how to create a simple plan, I recommend Loral Langemeier‘s The Millionaire Maker’s Guide to Creating a Cash Machine for Life book or her Building, Leading, and Protecting Your Business audio program.

Get your plan together so that you can join the 3% of businesses with 98% of the money.

Wayne Woodworth
The business man with the business plan

You hear all the time right now about unemployment.  People are going through layoffs, downsizings and rightsizings as companies seek to find a way through the current economy, or give up entirely and close their doors.

On the other hand, if you travel in small business / entrepreneurial circles, you hear people talk about being unemployable.  I’m not talking about people who have no skills and no ambition.  These are bright people with a lot of skills.  So why are they unemployable?

Because they choose to be.  They are of the mindset that they cannot be employed by another person because they have chosen to set their own course, take responsibility for their own results, and not allow any external agency to set limits on what they can accomplish.

I first heard this term in August 2008 at one of Loral Langemeier’s Cash Machine Workshops.  If you have never heard of Loral before I suggest you take a look at what she teaches.  She has come to be known as The Millionaire Maker and her best selling books are published under that title.  One of the things she teaches is that everyone should build a Cash Machine, a way to quickly make money with skills you already have.  Once you do that and have money coming in based solely on your own efforts and ideas you will understand what it means to be unemployable.

So, what are you going to do?

Wayne Woodworth
I’m becoming unemployable too.

Do you have an MBA? I don’t mean a Masters degree in business. I mean, do you have a Massive Bank Account? I heard the term most recently from Loral Langemeier who created the Cash Machine concept that I talked about last time. You could say that you get an MBA by majoring in your cash machine.

You need to have a massive bank account for several reasons. The most obvious reason right now is the economy. Gas prices have come down in the past couple months but it looks more likely that they will go up in the long term. Rising gas prices coincide with higher heating costs for your home because they are both based on oil, either directly or indirectly depending on whether you heat with gas or electricity. Higher has prices also translate into higher prices for goods that you purchase because the companies have to cover their transportation costs. Having a lot of money allows you to absorb these rising costs without having to significantly change your lifestyle.

Another aspect of the current economy is rising unemployment. Hopefully you will never have to experience being laid off from a job. If you did have to experience it though, a massive bank account can make it a whole lot less stressful. Having enough money saved up to cover your expenses for several months gives you the luxury of either taking the time to find the right job or to really take control of your finances and create your own business.

The last reason for why you need to be rich is for your own personal growth. Wallace Wattles says it best in his classic book The Science of Getting Rich published back around 1910.

Whatever may be said in praise of poverty, the fact remains that it is not possible to live a really complete or successful life unless one is rich. No man can rise to his greatest possible height in talent or soul development unless he has plenty of money; for to unfold the soul and to develop talent he must have many things to use, and he cannot have these things unless he has money to buy them with.

A man develops in mind, soul, and body by making use of things, and society is so organized that man must have money in order to become the possessor of things; therefore, the basis of all advancement for man must be the science of getting rich.

So, do you have an MBA? To summarize, you need a Massive Bank Account to help you ride out the ups and downs in our economy, to protect your family financially, and to have the tools to grow as a person. What are you going to do to create your riches?

I’m going to take a break from the string of posts I have been writing to talk about something that has been bothering me lately. Over the past few months I have been reading conflicting stories on CNN about the economy, gas prices, and other things that seem to affect us on a daily basis. You hear from one expert that we are in a recession, from another one that we’re not in a recession, or even two experts arguing about what the actual qualifications are for a recession. We all probably agree with the experts who say that high gas prices are bad for the economy. Well, I read a story recently from an expert who said that falling gas prices, as they are now, are bad for the economy. It appears that they are and indicator of a coming recession.

The point that I want you to get out of this is that you can find evidence or news stories by experts to support any view of reality that you want. You can find some experts that will tell you that you need to stay away from real estate because prices are dropping due to all the foreclosures. On the other hand, other experts say that now is the perfect time to get into real estate for the very same reason, so many foreclosures make prices low. People are selling off their stocks and leaving the stock market because prices are falling. I heard from another expert that now is the perfect time to get into the stock market because every time in our history that stocks have dropped like this, the market has increased by better than 50% in the next two years.

Instead of letting other people define your reality, pick your own view and go find evidence to support it. I will give you a few examples of people or companies creating their own reality.

I had a prospect back in June join my team in my network marketing business. She had already paid the money to join and received the business kit. She was a physical therapist and had just started working at a wellness center and thought that the Nikken products would be something that she could recommend to her clients. But she said she was really busy with the end of the school year and hoped to get to the business kit in a week or two. Well, I tried unsuccessfully to reach her until finally I got her on the phone at the end of July. Consistent with her belief that she is too busy, she never got around to even opening the business kit. In addition, she has quit the wellness center because she wasn’t getting any work. She said that the economy is bad and that people are not going to wellness centers. She admitted though that she didn’t do any marketing for herself, so is the lack of work because of the economy or because nobody knows she’s there because she never marketed herself. Her belief that she is too busy and that the economy is bad has created that reality for her.

The next example is the company that I work for (yes, I still have a JOB). They are a small company that competes against monster companies like Allen Bradley and Siemens to sell PLCs and other automation products. The company president knows that the economy is in recession but also believes that a recession is the company’s time to really shine because our products are much less expensive than the competition. So even though the economy is supposed to be bad and July is generally one of their slower months, they had the highest sales in their 12 year history. I’ve heard from the day that I started that this company is the company of choice when times get tough in the automation industry. That is what they believe and that is the reality that they are currently living.

The last example is of me and my network marketing business. For the longest time I limited myself by believing that people wouldn’t buy the more expensive items that are offered through Nikken, the network marketing company I am with. Also, like the lady I mentioned in the first example, I didn’t do any marketing. And sure enough, I didn’t sell much. In the past several months I have been learning how to market on the internet and that big ticket items are actually the best products to have because when you do sell them they make you a lot of money. They have to be worth the price and deliver the benefits of course. During June I really got busy with marketing, mostly with pay-per-click advertising on Google, and in the middle of a bad economy, sold almost $2000 worth of product which netted me a check for a little over $400. Not bad for someone just starting out. I changed my reality by changing my beliefs.

So, what reality do you want to create for yourself? Do you want to believe that the economy is shot to pieces, that you are too busy to make positive changes in your life, and that you will never make enough money to do the things you want to do? Or do you believe that life is good, the economy is improving (at least your economy), and that you can have money if you chose to make some changes?

The word “job” is really an acronym for “just over broke”. Too many people toil their lives away at a job for 45 years and end up having to get by on Social Security or work as a greeter at Walmart. I have nothing against greeters at Walmart, but by the time you retire you should have a choice about what you want to do with the rest of your life. If that is to be a greeter at Walmart because you enjoy the social interaction, then that’s great. It shouldn’t be because you need the money.

But we are doing exactly as we have been programmed to do. We are taught that we need to study hard in school and go to college so that we can get a good job making a good salary. Once you have accomplished that you’re set for life, right? I don’t think so. The first thing you do when you get your paycheck every month is pay the bills. There isn’t much left over afterwards, is there? Maybe enough to take the family out for dinner or to see a movie. If an emergency comes up then it goes on the credit card. Now there are more bills for the next payday and even less money left over.

It doesn’t have to be that way. You just need to learn about money. How to make it and how to use it. Our school system doesn’t teach us how to make money, and it isn’t designed to. You wouldn’t go to a drowning person to learn how to swim, so you can’t expect a teacher, who is paid only a little, to teach you how to get paid a lot. And you deserve to make a lot of money. We live in a world that has a lot to offer, but you have to have money to experience it.

Before we go any farther we have to get one thing clear. Money is not the root of all evil. The love of money is. Money is a tool and nothing more. You shouldn’t love money any more than you would love a hammer or a pencil. Money is also how we keep score in our society. You make money by providing a service. If you aren’t making much money then you aren’t providing enough service.

Don’t forget that.

Now for what this blog is about. For the past couple years I have been studying people who are making a lot of money and I want to share what I have learned. I am really just getting started on this journey and I will use this blog to share what I have learned and how it is working for me. I want you to join me on this adventure and to share your comments with me and everyone else.

Will you join me?

Next time I will write about Multiple Sources of Income.