The Magical Creation Box
This is another method of focusing on the things you desire and is similar to using a vision board. Use it when you want to give the Universe more specific details about what you want out of life.
I learned this method from a very interesting book I am reading at the moment called
“Ask and it is Given.” Learning to Manifest the Law of Attraction, by Esther and Jerry Hicks. Thanks Abraham.
Getting started: First find yourself a nice looking box. Any box that appeals to you is fine. Make sure it’s a decent size!
Write on it the words “Whatever is contained in this box – IS!
Next, gather magazines and catalogues and begin cutting out pictures of things that exemplify any desires that you hold. Clothes, cars, furniture, images of physical characteristics, overseas holidays; anything that appeals to you. Place the cut outs in your box. If you witness something you’d like to experience, write it down and put it in the box too. You get the idea. The more you clip tha better you’ll feel. You can also put mental images into your box. A blue sky, a sunny day; happy people or a great trip. If you like it, put it in your magical creation box.
The Law of Attraction delivers what you think about, and so this is a powerful process as it helps you to visualise. The more ideas you drop into your box, the more your desire will be focused and your dreams will begin to manifest.
Great photo by Plutor
No Doodads (or, take off your clothes)
Do you want to build passive income and become financially free? A good way to do this is to invest in “cash producing assets.”
What are cash producing assets? They are the opposite of liabilities. Assets will put money in your pocket whereas liabilities will take money out of your pocket!
Your car is a liability; your dog is a liability; your home is a liability, however if you rent it out and the rent covers all outgoings it will become an asset!
Positive cash flow rental property is definitely a cash producing asset. Shares? These would be a cash producing asset if they were providing income.
In between assets and liabilities are “doodads!” Doodads are things like widescreen TVs, meals at restaurants, your yacht, or other things that are not totally necessary (though life would be quite boring without them)!
Our eight year old son, in his wisdom, has decided that fashion is a doodad! He is right…an excess of clothes could be classed as doodads. I had to point out to him that clothes themselves are very necessary otherwise we’d all be running around starkers! A trip to the nudist beach had him convinced!
Obama ~ Time Wasting
“With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations – none of which I know how to work – information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.”
~ President Barack Obama
I’m with the president! If you want to be financially free and aren’t, you should take these words on board.
So many young people nowadays mis-use their time (and money) on such things as Twitter, Face Book, iphones, blogging etc. Gadgets abound. Information is burning their time instead of being used to improve their lives in some way.
I blog as I enjoy it but also because I really hope to inspire people into taking financial control. It horrifies me that people can get into such a terrible financial mess through a lack of basic financial education.
Blogging is a tool for me. Twitter, on the other hand, ruled me for a long time until I decided to go ‘cold turkey’. Apart from being a time waster it’s so addictive!
Time is precious. If you are serious about escaping the rat race you must use your time wisely. Spend some time learning to read financial statements. Read, read, read! Listen to motivational material on your Ipod! Don’t spend your money on doodads or liabilities. Income producing assets are what you need. Once you are out of the rat race you can play all the computer games and chat to all the friends you want!
You don’t have to throw out all your technological toys or close your Face Book account, but take control and limit their use. Spend your time planning your future. It’s called delayed gratification!
See 9 Initial Steps to Financial Freedom
Great picture by marcn
Daily Affirmation 4 Abundance
” I am one with the inifinte riches of my subconcious mind. It is my right to be rich, happy and successful. Money flows to me freely, copiously and endlessly. I am forever concious of my true worth. I give of my talents freely and I am wonderfully blessed financially!”
~ Anon
Dare to Dream ~ Short Quote
“Whatever you can do, or dream
you can do, begin it. Boldness
has genius, power and magic in it.”
~ Goethe
Lovely photo by Ezzz
Dream Books & Vision Boards
To manifest your dreams you must convince your subconcious mind that they have already been achieved. To do this you must visualise them as though you already have them. Make a ‘mental movie’ and play it over and over. Your subconcious mind cannot differentiate between what is real and what is not. It will pick up on the things you hold in your mind and make them reality.
A couple of great strategies to help you visualise your goals are “Dream Books” and “Vision Boards”. We were introduced to these techniques by Kurek Ashley, an Australian based “Life Success Coach” and founder of the “Life Success Club”.
Dream Books
These are just small notebooks…we had one each and we carried these around with us for years. In them we’d written our dreams, goals and intentions, as well as motivational quotes and anything else we felt important to us on on our journey to self-improvement and achieving financial freedom. We read each others books now and then to make sure we were striving for the same things! Double power.
My book included my goals with dates to have achieved them by, ‘my purpose for achieving my goals’, ‘my purpose in life’ and how I wanted my life to be in all areas, in bold colours! It also contained several affirmations. One I liked was: “Life is so good, life is so easy, all good things come to me”. I read these at least once a day and visualised my goals as if I already had them, then I gave thanks for receiving them. Gratitude is very powerful.
Vision Boards
Our vision boards sat on our dining room table so we couldn’t help but see them every day. We had two boards with pictures and photos of what we wanted in life pinned all over them. One was for the future life we dreamed of in Australia (the above photo of me and our son on Noosa Beach was pinned on this board. We now live near here and swim at this beach!), the home we wanted, lifestyle, friends etc; and another vision board for other things we wanted to do in life e.g travel to Africa, South America and Cuba, drive sports cars, own a boat etc
Soon the pictures became so familiar we could see them with our eyes closed. With these and our dream books the universe was certainly left in no doubt what we wanted!
Then we saw “The Secret” and realised that we had been using the Law of Attraction all along without realising it. Visualisation is the key. Now we knew exactly what to do we visualised like crazy and our dreams rapidly began to manifest themselves.
NB. If you are making your own vision board make sure that you are included in the photos you use (even if it means cutting out tiny pictures of yourself to glue on to them!). The universe will give you what you think about. If you concentrate on an empty sportscar, you will never be in it! Wave as you see it driving the other way down the street!
Looking back at our dream books now, we are amazed by how a lot of the things we had visualised were achieved, eerily near the dates we had set. The vision boards made visualising our desires much easier. We were immersed in them.
We still use our dream books. Not all our goals have manifested yet, but we know they will come.
Try these simple techniques. You may not achieve your goals overnight (though the universe does like speed!), but commit to them and watch the magic happen!
‘Leverage’ is the Magic Word
Do you want to accelerate your path to financial freedom? If so, you need to know about the power of leverage and how it applies to investing. Leverage is amplifying the power of your money, time and knowledge.
To illustrate this, let’s make a comparison between investing in the sharemarket using no leverage, and investing in positive cash flow real estate using leverage.
The difference is because the banks won’t normally lend to invest in the sharemarket, but will often lend 80% or more to enable you to purchase real estate.
Sharemarket: $100,000 invested is $100.000 of your own money in shares.
Returns- if the return is 5% your return is just that; 5% on your own money
Property: $100,000 invested, but $80,000 (80%) is borrowed and you put in only $20,000 of your own money.
Returns- 5% return on $100,000 invested = $5000. As only $20,000 of your own money was invested this is a 25% return on your own money.
Using the above figures, the return on your money invested in property (using leverage), is five times greater than the return on your money invested in the sharemarket (no leverage)!
Caution: with any leveraged/geared investment your gains can be increased, but so can your losses. Ensure your property is cash flow positive i.e creates you a profit before tax when all expenses, including borrowings, are included.
There are other types of leverage you might want to utilise. You can leverge your time by getting a good property manager and you can leverage your knowledge by using people who have already done it.
Read Robert Kiyosaki’s book “Retire Young, Retire Rich.” It’s all about leverage.
Disclaimer: this is not intended to be financial advice and is for guidance only. If you are interested in using leverage please consult a professional.
Impressions of Southern India
India has changed a lot since we last visited over ten years ago. There were far fewer hassles (except at the railway stations where touts still abound) and we didn’t even get scammed (unlike in Delhi, many years ago, when we got scammed twice in our first ten minutes)! The shop keepers didn’t badger us too much either. Maybe the southern indians are just more laid back than their fellow countrymen in the north?
We flew into to Chennai (Madras), travelled down the coast to the southernmost tip of India, then up the west coast to Cochine before heading inland via the hill stations, across to Mysore and Bangalore and back to Chennai.
The first thing we noticed was that there are a lot more ‘late model’ cars on the road, jostling for space with the hundreds of motorbikes and tuk tuks (auto rickshaws). They all drive like maniacs; forget malaria…the roads are the biggest danger. The humble bicycle is still popular but traditional rickshaws are much less common.
So, it seems in general the indians are getting richer; though there are still slums in evidence. However, we didn’t see a lot of beggars and, on the whole, people looked well fed.
The mainstream were very well presented. It is common to see ladies dressed to the nines, sitting sidesaddle on the back of motorbikes, dodging cows and routinely risking their lives, in the crush of traffic. How do they stay so beautiful amongst the grime?
The men are also smart with their trendy haircuts and freshly pressed shirts. It made me laugh; when we were in the Maharaja’s palace in Mysore, whenever the queue passed an ornate mirror all the young men would take out their combs and do their hair!!
The place is still pretty dirty with rubbish everywhere but, due to general hygiene standards improving a little and the advent of anti-bacterial hand wash (so you can sterilise your hands before you eat), we didn’t get the infamous “Delhi Belly”. In fact, the food was wonderful; especially the delicious masala dosas (fermented rice pancake stuffed with a savoury mixture) which are only available in the south. The curries are fiery hot and had our seven year old in tears one night!
Travelling down the east coast and through the countryside of Tamil Nadu, we saw a lot of massive universities, newly built. There were many specialist fields in evidence including high-tech engineering colleges and medical universities. (Medical tourism is another growing industry.) With their young population and their “you tell us what you want and we’ll make it happen” entreprenurial attitude, the indians are setting themselves up to take the world by storm.
(We have outsourced our accounting work to a company in Bangalore (read “The 4 Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss), and this was certainly their attitude. Their pricing is very competetive too. Watch out..they’re after your job).
Cricket is still wildly popular and most locals can name the entire Australian cricket team and the NZ team to boot!
It’s a shame, but inevitable, that with the rapid modernisation of India, some of it’s endearing quirks are disappearing. Reading the daily newspapers used to be hilarious, but nowadays there is barely a mention of “sleuths.” The odd amusing terms are sometimes used…I was once referred to as “your good self” and an email reply from one hotel was signed “Love and Regards”!!!
“Love and Regards India. We’ll be back“
Namaste
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