21st Century Academy

Have you always been interested in building wealth and achieving financial independence? Have you been thinking of getting started with the 21st Century Academy and the excellent investment advice and strategies offered?

To truly achieve wealth, you must invest in your future. Perhaps you are experiencing some trepidation about taking that first step. Start small. Think about the things you can do now to get ready to fully integrate an investment plan in your financial goals. It doesn’t really matter how you get started; the key is to just get started. Here are some simple steps anyone can take.

Get Out of Debt

Pay down those high interest credit card bills and installment loans as quickly as possible.. You will never have the funds to start investing until you reduce, or eliminate, unnecessary debt. In fact, the money you purge in interest payments can be considered an addition to your income.

Create a budget and stick to it. Forgo those unneeded expenses and concentrate on putting any extra money into an investment fund. It may be less fun now, but you will thank yourself when your future is secure and you finally experience financial independence.

Educate Yourself

Learn everything you can about the best strategies for building wealth and continue this process; no one ever knows everything and there is always something further to learn no matter your experience. This is one of the main benefits of the 21st Century Academy system of investment – the resources for knowledge are nearly endless, are all derived from a very reliable source, and it allows the opportunity to network with others.

Create a Plan

You can have knowledge and you can have money, but without a plan your investment efforts will be less than effective. Everyone needs a game plan for investing in order to become successful. There is always a road map to follow.

Make plans to invest every dollar you save, and reinvest part of every dollar of profit you make. Creating buckets of wealth is a great strategy. Diversify your portfolio so that a crash in one market does not wipe out your entire capital assets accounts.

This is a simple formula for creating a wealth strategy. Reduce debt, gain knowledge of the markets and investment opportunities, and develop a clear-cut plan to follow. Before you know it, you will be perfectly poised to take advantage of profitable investment opportunities and experience real financial independence.

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The only way you can truly create wealth and plan for financial independence is to take opportunities when they present themselves. Of course, it’s not always quite that easy. First you have to be prepared to act, then you have to identify opportunities as they occur, and finally you must take action.

1.    Prepare
2.    Identify
3.    Act

You may negatively associate the term “opportunist” with someone who takes advantage of the misfortune of others. This is not necessarily true. An opportunist is really nothing more than a person who acts on an opportunity, regardless of possible negative consequences. Those consequences may ultimately prove to be negative for the opportunist himself, or for someone else.

How to Become a Opportunist

We probably do not want to think of ourselves as a vulture waiting to swoop down on those less fortunate. The truth is, good investments and financial strategy often depend on taking advantage of economic and market conditions.

What opportunities are currently present? The real estate market has experienced an extreme downturn in recent years. This presents an opportunity to invest in property by lowing low, hanging onto your real estate, then selling it when the market rebounds.

The same holds true in the stock market. As pricing falls, there are many opportunities to buy up undervalued shares and wait for the right opportunity to sell and realise a profit.

Consider, too, the latest initiatives in societies across the globe. Renewable energy sources are a hot topic – and hot stocks. If you can get in on the ground floor of a new company poised to make a real splash in the market, this presents a great opportunity for building wealth.

Be Ready

The first part of being ready to take advantage of opportunities is to keep a close eye on global trends. Watch stock market activity in various countries. Look for economic changes and political activity that directly affect stocks and other types of investments.

The second part of the equation in becoming an opportunist is accumulating enough assets to make funding possible. The best opportunity in the world is not going to benefit you if you do not have the financial means to make it happen. Start by learning all you can. Reading Jamie McIntyre’s free e-book is a great start to get you thinking about ways you can amass an investment stake.

Continue with the 21st Century Academy Wealth building program and you will be poised to take advantage of opportunities, as they occur. Become an opportunist. It is a great way to positively invest in your future.

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Often, the only thing lacking in our road map to success is the knowledge of how to reach our goals. Where do you start? What do you need to know? What are common mistakes to avoid?

Perhaps your ultimate goal is to quit working your nine to five job and rely on a passive income stream, Maybe you are ready to retire and you want to feel financially secure. No matter your dream, it is not enough to simply visualise it; you need to plan the path to achieve it. Part of the planning process is knowing what steps you need to take along the way. And you can’t define the steps without first understanding the process.

Feed Your Brain

Everyone learns differently. Some of us learn better using visuals, others have to actually perform a task in order to remember and assimilate it. Most of us need some help finding where to look for the right information and how to go about the process of acquiring knowledge from a logical beginning to a logical end.

This is how the experience of someone like Jamie McIntyre benefits the person just learning how to create wealth. There’s no need to go it alone and figure it out yourself. Use the expertise of someone who has already been exactly where you are now and figured out how to advance beyond that beginner stage to find financial independence.

Endurance Training

No, this doesn’t refer to getting physically fit. Rather, it’s about training your spirit and mind; making them healthy to perform at their utmost. The brain is just like any other muscle in your body; it requires a good workout in order to strengthen.

The process of training your mind begins with increasing its store of knowledge. Once you have educated it, then the process of fine tuning those skills comes into play. The more you learn and the more you use those new skills, the more you will train your mind to stay fit.

Building wealth is a mindset that you must develop, and sharpen. Yes, you can use your current knowledge to get started achieving financial independence, as stated previously. But don’t stop there. Keep on feeding your brain and see just where it takes you. Make the most of today by implementing a training regimen for your brain that includes increasing your knowledge and education. The web can be your friend through sources like blogs, articles, and books and once you spend consistent time on your education and mindset you’ll be on the road to financial security in no time.

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In one of the last posts, we talked about the traditional formula for success that most people are following in hopes of becoming wealthy one day. The formula, as you may recall, goes something like this:

· Go to school
· Get a “good” education
· Work approximately 45 years (or more) until you can retire

This is what most people do—we get educated, find a job, and work until around age 65. More likely, as age expectancies continue to climb, you’ll end up working past 65, because you’ll have that many more years to fund beyond retirement.

So let’s see how this success formula works out for us.

Where Will You Be At Age 65?

At age 65, you will fall into one of three categories:

1. Rich. If you are lucky, you will be among the 1% of the population who will be considered “rich.” Odds aren’t with you, though, and really not in your favor at all if you follow the success formula above—that’s not how the rich get here.
2. Financially Independent. The odds are a little better here—you may be one of the small 4% of the population that is able to stop working as planned and maintain a comfortable lifestyle—not a wealthy lifestyle, but you’re able to pay the bills and remain out of the workforce.
3. Dead, Dead Broke, or in Need of Family assistance. These are the options for 96% of the population—the 96 percent who continue to follow the “Formula for Success.” At the age of retirement, the great majority of the population will be either dead, near death (within, say, less than three years), or living on a very fixed income and in need of family assistance.

This all sounds very doomsday, but this is reality. Not as uplifting as most of our posts around here, but this is a stark dose of reality aimed at showing you the path you are heading on, if you continue to follow the traditional route to “wealth.”

Not everyone is following this path, though. Four to five percent of the population has veered off, because they can see where it’s heading. Those are the five percent in the top categories.

Which group do you want to fall into?

To Your Continued Success!
Sean Rasmussen
21st Century Academy
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2009

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When you set off to find answers to the kinds of questions Jamie McIntyre asked—like why some people in wealthy nations are rich but the majority are not, or like the larger question at hand in the first chapter—Why do most people fail?—you start to look for some common ground that might point to a solution. This leads to an interesting thought that Jamie had, which he shares in the book in the opening paragraphs of Chapter 1.

What’s The Difference?

One of the first things to pique Jamie’s curiosity was this—why do some people start with nothing and make it big, and others start with everything but lose it? Does luck have anything to do with this? Education?

None of these things seems to be the answer. Nor does marrying into money or inheriting it. In fact, there seems, at least superficially, to be no rhyme or reason to who becomes wealthy.

• People of all ages become wealthy—in their twenties, thirties, forties, sixties, and at older ages, too.
• People of all education levels become wealthy—and people of all education levels continue to struggle financially; even those with higher degrees who we think might be smarter than us.
• People can gain and lose a fortune in a matter of a year—look at the statistics for lottery winners.

On the surface, it looks like the answers to this question are all over the board. In reality, though, there are common factors here. There are distinct reasons why some people are wealthy and others are not. But the answers are not superficial; they go much deeper than just finding nice categories to fit wealthy people in. This is the purpose of the first chapter of the book—to help you understand why you are not wealthy, but to help you understand the real reasons. That’s the first order of business in wealth creation.

To Your Continued Success!
Sean Rasmussen
21st Century Academy
Universal Wealth Creation © 2004 - 2009

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