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CASHFLOW Quadrant
Where Are You?
Take a moment and assess where you are today.
Are You at Investor Level 1?
If there is nothing in your asset column with no income coming in
from your investments and you have too many liabilities, then you are
starting at the bottom level, ground zero.
If you are deeply in bad debt, your best investment might be to
get out of debt. There is nothing wrong with being deeply in debt,
unless you do nothing. After I lost my first business, I was nearly a
million dollars in debt. It took me almost five years to reach zero. In
many ways, learning from my mistakes and taking responsibility for
my mistakes was the best education I could have asked for. If I had not
learned from my mistakes, I would not be where I am today.
Kim and I put together a simple program and workbook,
How We Got Out of Bad Debt, explaining the process we used to get out
of hundreds of thousands of dollars of bad debt. It is a simple, almost
painless, process. All it takes is some discipline and a willingness to learn.
Are You at Investor Level 2?
If you are a saver, be very careful, especially if you are saving money
in a bank or in a retirement plan. In general, savers are losers.
Saving is often a strategy for people who do not want to learn
anything. You see, it takes no financial intelligence to save. You can
train a monkey to save money.
The risk in saving is that you learn little. And if your savings are
wiped out, either by market decline or devaluation of the money
supply, you wind up without money and without education.
Remember that the U.S. dollar has lost 95 percent of its value since
1971. It will not take long to lose the rest of its value.
As stated before, a person can even lose money saving gold if they
buy gold at the wrong price.
I suggest taking a few courses on investing, either in stocks or real
estate, and see if anything interests you. If nothing interests you, then
keep saving.
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