Italy is...screwed?

By Liam Halligan, Economic Agenda


7:40PM BST 29 Oct 2011

“…The Italian government on Friday paid 6.06pc for 10-year money, up from just 5.86pc a month ago and a euro-era high. Such borrowing costs are disastrous, given that Rome must roll-over €300bn of its €1,900bn debt in 2012 alone. A default by Italy, the eurozone's third-biggest economy, and the eighth-largest on earth, would make Lehman look like a picnic…”

"What are your plans to be rich one day?"

     Sometimes I ask people, “What are your plans for being rich one day?” Mostly it is out of curiosity, but also to see if there is anything I can glean from them. Surprisingly most say, as two of my coworkers this last week said, that they’re never going to be rich or don’t want to be. I am always baffled by this and will continue to be. Who wouldn’t want to be rich?! Now there are different reasons for all of us for why we’d want to be rich and some are good and some are bad. Certainly being rich for the wrong reasons is bad, but being rich or having goals to be rich isn’t evil.


     Who wouldn’t you want to be well off in order to spend more time with their spouse, kids, family, hobbies, or even work? If you were well off wouldn’t you like to go and do what you REALLY wanted to in life?  What is that even?  I'm sure most people haven't even thought about that since they don't have time to or don't want to.  They wouldn't want to since once they did they'd then learn how much they hated their current situation AND they'd be too afraid to do something about it.

      I’ve been studying and reading a lot of books over the last several months on the economy and finance in general. I’ve found that there are very definitive ways to profit in the coming economic collapse (this is what my studying and reading has discovered) and these ways aren’t get rich schemes or hard for the average person to understand. I’m interested in them as my end goal is to be the kind of spouse/father that I want to be or know I can be, but can’t truly accomplish them to the level I have in mind by NOT being wealthy like I am right now.

     Part of the reason I’m doing this blog is to get rich. Not to sell anything, but to get my thoughts in order and have them critiqued so that I can improvise my ‘moves’.  It is to learn and grow.  I am a fan of the book and thinking in Rich Dad Poor Dad.  Financial education creates an Unfair Advantage for the rich.  I think this unfair advantage is what the OWS people should learn about.  I've got a blog post to come on OWS later.  I also want to give back to the global community what I feel I’ve been blessed to stumble upon and understand. I truly believe that the more you give, the more you get. Some call that Karma.


Try it out for yourself. Ask someone what they’re going to do to get rich one day and see how you feel and see what you think afterwards.

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Cashflow and my sister

If I really want to make an impact on people around me then I need to have a ‘why’ mentality versus a ‘what’ mentality when trying to explain things to them that are important otherwise they won’t internalize it. This makes me think about my little sister. She came up this weekend with my younger brother and his fiancé and spent the weekend at our house. She had never played the game Cashflow. It is a game by Robert Kiyosaki. It teaches you about financial independence. Right now she is a freshman in college and learning about that isn’t really a priority right now. She wasn’t really into the game as she didn’t really understand the math behind it, but if we had been able to explain the WHY of the game then she might have had interest in really learning how to play and what it could mean for her later on down the road.


What I mean by this is that she has goals to be an art therapist, with goals of getting her masters in it and bachelors in psychology I believe. She is one of those people that don’t care about money, but instead of what kind of impact she can have on others. It was lost on me and the other people around her playing the game that we needed to guide her, not tell her, to the ‘why’ it was important for HER to be independent financially. If she were financially independent then she could focus on others to the fullest of her capability whereas now and in her future if she isn’t focused on reigning in expenses and buying assets that cover her monthly expenses she’ll be working for a paycheck at times instead of working for the benefit of others like I believe she’d like to do.

The key is turning your earned income from your job into portfolio income and that is something we missed the boat on teaching her about. Hopefully I’ll have another crack at helping on that in the future.

Why? Not what.

        I just watched a video that talks about how successful people/ideas take off when people focus on the ‘Why’ and not the ‘What’. One example the speaker used was Tivo. Tivo has the best technology still and their company name is used as a verb or a noun when referring to other competitor’s technologies, i.e. “I’m going to Tivo the football game on my Comcast DVR.” The problem with them is that they told people what they needed, instead of why they needed it. For this reason the company has since been flat in its growth.

        The same applies to leadership and life in general I guess and what I want to apply to my blog. People won’t follow you or believe you if tell them what, but why. When you tell them why you do things and why they should do things they in turn internalize what you’ve said and make it their own. He talked about how there are Innovators of things. Then there are early adopters. Then there are early majority, late majority, and finally laggards. Innovators make things, but for those things to really take flight you need the early adopters to take it and praise it, as they are the ones that lead to the rest of the group using the product/idea. If you target the rest of the group then it never takes flight. This is what I need to do in my personal and business life.