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Check out FORTITUDE.

We Fall

Failures

• Loss of Home to Short Sale or Foreclosure
• Loss of Egg Farm Business
• Loss of Retirement Funds

Nancy Merrill, the mayor of Eagle, Idaho from 2002 to 2006, and her husband, have lost their 4,646-square-foot home valued in 2007 at $1.2 million after failing to pay the $3,563.16 monthly amortization since October 2008.  If their mortgage bank won’t approve their plan to sell their home through a short sale, the bank will sell the house in a foreclosure auction on May 29.

They Merrills mortgaged their home in 2000 to buy out their partners in a farm that supplies eggs to Albertsons supermarkets.  They also used their retirement funds in the buyout.  Due to increased operational costs and diminished profits, the business closed in 2007.

The Merrills have four children.

Source:  Joe Estrella, author
Title of Article: Former Eagle mayor Nancy Merrill joins throng facing foreclosure
Website: idahostatesman.com

Picture: Dennis Jonas

We Fall

Failures

• Loss of villa to foreclosure
• Loss of savings and other people’s investments
• Loss of business

In 2004, electrical engineer Suzy Brown started building her dream project — a 15-bedroom 17-bathroom Spanish-hacienda-style villa in an upscale neighborhood in San Diego.  She and her partners envisioned it as a high-end drug rehabilitation center for wealthy clients.

On February 13, Brown’s dream villa was foreclosed by lender Chevy Chase Bank, and on March 26, the bank reported a theft of nearly $1 million worth of fixtures from the mansion.

Brown partnered with best-selling author and alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra and 60 other investors.  Deepak later backed out, funds dried out and the bank finally foreclosed on the mansion.

Brown had to fight neighbors to launch her project.  Residents opposed Brown’s plan to treat up to 41 patients in the villa, arguing that California zoning law allows only up to six patients in facilities inside residential neighborhoods.

Brown said she spent $13 million on the villa, using all her savings and
money from investors. The villa was the realization of her dream, using dream fixtures and installing her own smart home system for the villa.

She moved out of the mansion on March 22.  She said she regrets building the villa.  “I spent 5 years and all my money went down the drain. I’m bankrupt now. I lost other people’s money.  Now I have to start over.”

Source: Paul Sisson, author
Article:  Encinitas: Monster house ends up a nightmare
Web site: nctimes.com

Photo:  John Koster for North County Times

Source:  Mike Von Fremd, author
Article:  Million-Dollar Foreclosure Theft
Web site:  abcnews.go.com

• he has started his own technical writing enterprise before he lost his day  job
• he got the highest redundancy payment in the history of our project
• he got his wish and more; he has been wanting to resign months                 before. Surely, the redundancy pay that he got was much much more than the amount he could get if he resigned.

Here is his email to me, which is useful to others also:

Nora,
As I have said, I am striving to learn constantly and I would like to share with you what I have learned recently. As you can see, it appears that I was lucky to be the one chosen for the redundancy slot. According to my other mentors that include George Clason, Joe Vitale and Mike Dooley, there is no such thing as luck. I would now like to believe that it is one of the fruits of my declarations and my plan.

I have made daily declarations after getting up in the morning and before retiring in the evening as part of my daily routine. This is one of the key lessons given by Napoleon Hill in “Think and Grow Rich,” and it is also asserted by T. Harv Eker. By the way, Eker is that person who became famous for stating that by just talking to a person for five minutes, he could predict that person’s financial future. He is also a person who actually practiced what he preaches in the same manner as Robert Kiyosaki. Eker has also become well-known for making a million dollars in less than three years as a result of his studies of the psychology of the rich and a business that he built from scratch.

You see, it was Eker who revealed in his book, “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind,” that our subconscious mind is preventing most people from getting rich. The money principles and ideas we learned beginning in our childhood continue to influence our life. Also, our previous experiences with money continue to affect our financial success today if we do not do anything to remedy these faults in our “money blueprint.” I strongly recommend that you read this book.

Now… regarding the plan. You see, many people as they grow older throw away their dreams because they finally realize that the path they are on makes it impossible for them to reach their dreams. They realize that they are trapped in the Rat Race that keeps going around in circles. So what does the average person do? He or she declares that dreams are just that. Dreams. They have no substance. They are not real. And therefore, they point out with the “wisdom” of their age that to dream is foolish.

Now, what about those people who had realized their dreams? The average person would say, that these people were just lucky. Remember what Eker stated about poor people? They complain, blame and justify. A person with a rich mindset will never do that. Eker warns us from complaining, blaming and justifying because this would doom us to financial failure.

Rich people realize their dreams because they have a plan. This is a key ingredient in the path towards success. According to Kiyosaki, the plan is the bridge to our dreams because we are separated from our dreams by a roaring river and the plan creates the bridge that allows us to cross to the other side. The plan permits us to get out of the Rat Race trap.

Of course, realizing our dreams takes more than just a plan. I’ll delve into the other ingredients later because this letter is already quite long. Why am I sharing this to you? You see, one of the ways to learn is to share. As I am writing this letter to you, I am learning.

May the Lord God bless us in our endeavors.

Edel

What my friend Edel has been telling me everytime we meet about job security has now come true for me. He has been telling me to get out of the E quadrant and start my way to the S quadrant and ultimately to the B and I quadrant. Of course, I didn’t know those letters. And come to think of it, I didn’t really pay attention when he was discussing those things to me. Even after he wrote me a letter. After I was put on forced leave, I re-read the letter. Wow, he really writes so well and I’d like to share it with you:

Hi Nora:

For you to better understand my plan, I have attached an image of the Cashflow Quadrant as illustrated by Robert Kiyosaki.

Employee: You have a job
Business owner: You own a job
Self-employed: You own a system and people work for you
Investor: Money works for you

He explained that people operate in at least one of these quadrants, but most people operate only in the E quadrant. Why? Because it is a comfortable place to be. Everything has become routine. You wake up in the morning, get dressed, eat breakfast and then go to work. After work, you come home, view TV and then go to sleep. The next day, the pattern is the same. Every 15 days, you get your paycheck.

The problem with the E quadrant (and for that matter, with the S quadrant) is that there is very little leverage. You cannot make duplicates of yourself to increase you income capacity. And if you cannot go to work, you do not have the income. Right? On top of it, you have no tax advantage. Your tax gets withheld every payday and you have no control over it.

The S quadrant is a bit better than the E quadrant. There is a little bit more leverage here and the tax could be less. However, the leverage is still limited and the income also stops if the person stops working.

The B quadrant is where I want to be. This is where a system has been put in place so that even if I don’t get up and go to work, the income continues to pour in. On top of that, leverage is at its highest. So if your company has 500 employees, your income-generating potential is multiplied by that number. Now, that is leverage!

That is how Henry Sy, Lucio Tan, the Ayalas, the Lopezes, and other multimillionaires were able to generate their wealth and continue to do so with very little effort on their parts. The problem with this quadrant is that it takes time to build it and it takes much more work than in the E quadrant when you are starting to build it. That is why, I had less and less time to spare for Ebsco during the past few months.

Moreover, many people cannot handle the uncertainty. They believe that building a business is risky. They look at the statistics and point out that nine out of 10 businesses that start fail. The funny thing is they do not see the one business that made it. And even if your first, second, third and so forth, business failed, you would have gained vital knowledge that you would be able to utilize in your next venture. Many people shirk from going into this quadrant because we have been trained in school that failure is bad. Robert Kiyosaki himself failed in his first three business ventures. But he kept going on and the odds became better for him as he learned from his past failures. Failures are not bad if we learn from them.

The I quadrant is for investors. I am planning to get into this quadrant too. Thanks to Ebar. In this quadrant, it is the money that serves as the leverage, in contrast to the B quadrant where other people’s time is the leverage. It is in the I quadrant where you have your money work for you instead of you working for it. Makes sense? This is where my on-going training in the Cashflow game comes in. Do you know that it takes only a little money to make money? Do you know that if you keep your money in the bank, it is the bank that is becoming richer by using your money, in the same way that it is the investors in the company that you are working for who are becoming richer by using their employees’ time?

The problem is that it takes a different mindset to shift to another quadrant. Meaning, you have to change your mindset first before you can shift to the B and I quadrants. That is the importance of constant learning. Moreover, very few people know about financial IQ. That is why no matter how large the salary of a person in the E quadrant is, the end result will almost always be the same: retirement on an income level that is less than his or her salary. No wonder, many people depend on their children when they get to their golden years. Now that is such a sad story I would not like to partake in. Do you?

See ya.

Edel

Our franchise lasted for only two years, and we never recovered our investment. It’s painful going back to where we lost a lot of money, but I hope this can help others, and heal some of my hurt as well.

Some of our mistakes were:

1.  We chose a franchise that was only 11 months old. We were also blinded  by the fact that the franchise had attracted almost 50 franchises in just a few months, including some celebrities. Today, I no longer see the ones in the malls and the ones along my way to work.

2.  We failed to see that the franchise used ingredients prone to big price increases.

3.  We didn’t evaluate the electric consumption of the main cooking device. The electric bill became our biggest monthly expense.

4. Early on, we targeted only malls. We failed to see that there were locations outside the malls with the targeted traffic and lower rents. When we found out one, we could no longer get out of our mall contract without forfeiting our big deposit. What makes me feel bad is when I pass by the non-mall location I previously inquired about and see people lining up to buy from the one who inquired after I passed up.

5.  We made wrong assumptions about mall traffic. Before signing the mall contract, we should have returned to the mall on different days and checked whether people were coming in and what people were buying for snacks or meals.

6.  We made our exit too late. We could have cut our losses had we not held on to false hopes and not renewed our contract with the mall.

I didn’t name our franchise to protect those lucky ones who are still operating and those who are still trying to recoup their losses.