Why Business Smarts Are Investing Smarts

A great quote from Warren Buffett goes: "I'm a better investor because I'm a businessman, and I'm a better businessman because I'm a better investor." So let me tell you how to be a better investor by being better at business.

Business knowledge varies among these three kinds of people:

1. Non-Investors: They expect that someone (such as their parents, their kids, a spouse, a company, or the government) will take care of them when their working days are over.
2. Passive Investors: They turn their money over to someone or some organization, such as a mutual fund, to manage. It's the passive investor who tends to believe the financial planners' mantra of "work hard, save money, get out of debt, invest for the long term, and diversify."
3. Active Investors: These people tend to manage their own portfolios and assets, as well as hand-picking their advisors, who are not brokers or sales people. To be a successful active investor requires a higher financial IQ, more real world entrepreneurial business experience, and a very smart advisory team.

For non-investors and passive investors, investing is risky. The main reason is because these two groups of people have no control over the investments they're involved in. While active investors know there's risk, they also realize that the greater the control they have, the less the risk.

Getting a Grip on Business

What do I mean by control? Let me illustrate using the example of driving a car. To be a safe driver, there are six basic controls we all must have:

1. Steering wheel
2. Gas pedal
3. Brakes
4. Gear shift
5. Driver's education/license
6. Insurance

You wouldn't drive a car if you didn't have any one of the above controls. Yet, when it comes to investing, this is what most people do -- they invest without having any influence over the six basic controls of investing or a business:

1. Income
2. Expenses
3. Asset value
4. Liabilities
5. Financial education/management
6. Insurance

The reason Warren Buffett says he's a better investor is because he's a businessman who has control of those six levers of a business. In other words, he can tell how good an investment is by how well management manipulates these basic controls. In most of his investments, Buffett doesn't just buy an equity position, he does his best to buy control of the business.

Opportunity or Threat

Earlier article in this blog, The story is about most of the people in the world are going towards self-employ. The trend is happening now. As I myself look around me, most of my colleague started looking for online business, as what they heard many of their friends become rich and successful in this self employed industry.An Online Investment program.

I did joined a few online investment program. It's great.There are thousand Online Investment Programmed offered now days. Are they trusted or Scam. Most HYIP or any investment programmed do notice its potential investor to invest only amount that they afford to loose.The thing is not the issue whether they afford or not. The history could tell the truth.

More than thousand HYIP programmed listed scam in few trusted website and it sucks million of investor money.Why the internet user are not aware with this issue? Actually it how people perceive it "Threat or Opportunity". Actually its the same thing happen in the conventional investment industry.

Between 1995 and 2005, literally trillions of investor dollars were stolen from ordinary people with hopes for a secure retirement or a college education for their kids.

Today, such corporate giants such as Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, and others are gone -- taking trillions of investor dollars with them. But with the Dow over 12,000 memories of these offenders have vanished just as surely, and investors are once again flocking to the stock market.

Many of the crooks responsible for such acts have never been caught and some remain in business. In the same vein, while the savings of average people across the country were being wiped out, the New York Stock Exchange "inadvertently" awarded CEO Dick Grasso a $187 million dollars in compensation

Your mind is still your most important asset, so be careful who you take your advice from and what you believe is true. Remember that all financial markets are filled with good but not necessarily innocent people looking after their own self-interests before they look after yours.


But in less than 3 years, memories of that horrible disaster were erased, crooks and corruption were forgotten, and people were pouring their money back into real estate and Scam programmed. Don't be greedy!

The best is let the history tell you the truth! Do not ignore the statistic. Do not trust your financial Planner ( as what they claimed ) because they actually just a salesperson. Learn from Investor not a salesperson.

I'm not saying it's simple to find investments that make money right away. As the saying goes, "If it was easy, everyone would do it." Yet we all know how easy it is to find investments that lose money or that cost money -- that's why there are so many people who invest for tomorrow rather than for today.

Protecting Yourself When You're Self-Employed

WRITTEN BY:Suze Orman

A new study conducted by the nonprofit Institute for the Future reports that more of us will turn to self-employment in the future.

I can't say I was too surprised by this (especially considering that the project was sponsored by small-business software maker Intuit). Given that job security is so last-century, it makes sense that more people would want to -- or be forced to -- strike out on their own.

Taking Blind Risks

What I found interesting in the study is that baby boomer are currently the fastest growing demographic to go into business for themselves, and that's expected to accelerate over the next decade.

For some boomer, the entrepreneurial itch is a necessity: When you still have a mortgage to pay, college tuition to handle, and another 30 or 40 years to live, being downsized or gently pushed out from a corporate job doesn't mean your need to work has disappeared. For others, it's a desire to break out of the corporate world without switching to golf 24/7.

But my antennae started buzzing when I read this in the report: "They [boomers] have better access to capital, either from their own savings or through their work and personal networks."

This worries me. Whether it's living off of an emergency cash fund while launching a business, raiding retirement funds, or tapping home equity, far too many entrepreneurial wannabes empty their piggybanks without really thinking through the potential risks they're taking.

Planning for Entrepreneurship

If you hope to join the ranks of the successfully self-employed, you need to do a lot of advance financial planning.

Here are the proper steps to take:

• Figure out the replacement cost of lost benefits.

If you leave a corporate job, you probably leave behind plenty of benefits, too, including health insurance, life insurance, flexible spending accounts, and company matching of your contributions to a 401(k). Exactly how do you expect to pick up the slack and cover those costs yourself?

If you have a big financial cushion, then you're sitting pretty. But most people quit their jobs and give themselves six months to get their new venture up and running, and it isn't until after they quit that they sit down and tally up the cost of all the bills they're now 100 percent responsible for.

The result is that they run through their emergency cash fund at about double the speed they anticipated. Pretty soon they have no savings left, yet their new business is still far from breaking even.

In addition, it's almost a given that in the first two or three years of being self-employed, people give themselves a retirement break: they tell themselves its OK that they aren't setting aside any money while they concentrate on getting their business off the ground.

That's a costly gamble. If you were contributing $10,000 a year to your 401(k) and receiving a $1,500 company match, that's $40,000 or so over three years that won't be compounding for you. This is fine if you're incredibly successful (and diligent) and manage to catch up with big retirement contributions once your business becomes solvent, but there's no guarantee it will become solvent at all.

• Don't access retirement savings.

Your 401(k) is not a business-financing tool. Even those who are at least 55 and thus can make penalty-free withdrawals after leaving a job are reckless to touch their retirement savings.

Let's say you use $50,000 to live on in the first year of your new business, and plan to "replace" the money once the business takes off. What if it doesn't take off? You've just siphoned off a serious chunk of your retirement security. Consider that if the $50,000 had stayed invested for another 10 years and grew at an annualized 8 percent, it would be worth nearly $108,000. That could cover a lot of retirement expenses.

The no-raid policy is just as important for those in their 30s and 40s. Not only will they be hit with the 10 percent early-withdrawal penalty (as well as the regular income tax everyone pays on 401(k) distributions regardless of age), they're throwing away precious compounding time.

Leaving $50,000 untouched for another 30 years would result in it growing to more than $500,000, assuming an 8 percent average annual return. Withdrawing it at age 35, however, means you'd be lucky to have $30,000 left after paying the penalty and tax.

• Keep the home-equity tap turned off.

It's the height of financial lunacy to tap your home equity to finance a startup. Even if it's relatively safe to assume that your business is going to be successful, you're still converting what was an asset (your home equity) to a debt.

Can your new cash flow cover the extra cost of that home equity line? If not, you could lose your house. And who's truly prepared for the cost of the home equity line of credit to go up every time there's an uptick in short-term interest rates? Based on what I've observed over the past year, very few homeowners anticipate their interest rate going up two, three, or four percentage points, and many are now experiencing extreme mortgage stress.

• Don't rely on credit.

Even if you get a great low-introductory rate on a credit card, it's going to be incredibly hard to keep that rate low for very long. Many introductory rates adjust after six months to a year, and in the meantime the credit card company is scrutinizing your every financial move to see if it can come up with an excuse to boost the rate even sooner.

If you insist on financing some of your startup on your credit card, please give yourself a set-in-stone conservative limit you will not exceed. Remember, you can pull the plug on your business, but if you have $20,000 or $30,000 of credit card debt you're going to be paying for that for years to come.

Don't expect to just walk away from it: It's never been harder to qualify for bankruptcy, and besides, if you go that route your credit is going to be awful for at least 7 to 10 years.

The Responsible Route

So how can you responsibly afford to venture out on your own?

Start planning for it today. Set aside separate savings that will cover your family's finances for at least a year if you decide to become an entrepreneur. If you can't imagine where to come up with the money, it's time to get back to basics: Scour your spending and make sacrifices so you can build up your entrepreneurial financial cushion.

You might also consider taking a part-time job while you're launching your own business. I realize you want to devote all your time to your own business, but keeping some money coming in will go a long way toward giving you and your family financial breathing room.

FEAR AND RISK

Most of the people fail to reach their success because they fail to identified their FEAR.

When we talk about fear means we talk about Risk.We misjudge risk if we feel we have some control over it, even if it's an illusory sense of control. Take example of people who drive rather than fly.

Even though the risks of death are higher driving than flying, many people would rather drive simply because they feel they have more control driving. The facts are that only a few hundred people die a year flying and 44,000 are killed a year driving in the USA . After Sept. 11, 2001, many people took to the roads rather than the skies. Not surprisingly, between October and December 2001, there were a 1,000 more deaths.

Today, many people feel they have more control if they have money in savings. Thus the saying, "Safe as money in the bank." But the fact is that savers are the biggest losers of all.

The point is, in spite of the facts, many people feel safer with money in the bank because they feel they have more control over it. They don't understand about the power of leverage (an ability to make more with less)

The point is that when we're afraid, we tend to ignore the statistics and listen to our emotions. As I mentioned above, you're over 500 times more likely to die in a car than in an airplane. Yet cars are not the biggest of all killers.

Of the 2.5 million deaths annually in the United States, the No. 1 killer is heart disease. In 2003, there were 685,089 deaths due to heart attack. Auto accidents caused 44,000 deaths. Only 17,732 deaths by murder and 1 death by shark attack occurred in the same year.

Despite these statistics, more people are afraid of sharks and murderers than driving up to a fast food restaurant and saying, "Super-size it." French fries kill more people than guns and sharks, yet nobody's afraid of French fries.

The same is true in the investment world. Since many people believe investing is risky, they go for the second-riskiest investment, "SAVING, FIX DEPOSIT, UNIT TRUST etc which are like french fries. They may fill you up, but they aren't good for you in the long run."