November 2010 | Bigg Success

Monthly Archives: November 2010

The Entrepreneurial Family Lifestyle

Written on November 5, 2010 by George Krueger & Mary-Lynn Foster in Life Planning

family BIGG Success is life on your own terms. It’s about designing the life you want, personally and professionally, and finding your path to get there. It's about entrepreneuring your life. You are the entrepreneur of your own life.

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Hear Fabienne share how she is living life on her own terms on The BIGG Success Show! Click the player to listen [4:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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We normally think being an entrepreneur means “I own my own business.” We’re saying that, whether you’re employed or self-employed, you are an entrepreneur. You own your life. You're not the CEO, you're not the brand manager, it's not your personal brand, it goes beyond that. You are the owner. You bring together the resources necessary to build that life. You put the structure that is needed in place to achieve your bigg dream.

It’s not just about the work that you do. Your life is about more than that. But sometimes we segment our work and life so much that we don't see the opportunity to think holistically. We have to bring together both our professional and personal lives. As the entrepreneur of your own life, it’s crucial to find ways to make all the parts of your life work together, synergistically.

So what are YOUR terms? What is YOUR dream?

A Woman, Her Family, and Her Terms

Fabienne Fredrickson, is a small business coaching expert, who helps owners learn how to market themselves to attract more clients. Here's how she and her husband are living life on their own terms…and why:

"Two years ago when I took my business to the million dollar mark for the first time, my husband and I had long discussions in the middle of the night and on long drives, and we decided that he was going to quit his job at the investment bank and join the company. He is now CEO and runs the entire operations and has helped triple the business. Now our children get to see mommy and daddy working together, and we're setting an example for them on how you can create your own life on your own terms. We get to spend a lot of time with them and each other, and we've created what we call the entrepreneurial family lifestyle! It's truly been magical."

Isn't that fantastic? Her work and life are so very important to her, and she's a BIGG Success because she's figured out how to get the best of both worlds in her life.You can learn more about Fabienne at: clientattraction.com and later this month, she will be a guest on our show.

BIGG thanks to our friends Shea Maultsby and Marcella Palmer of
M.INK Productions and IFV News, where they provide entrepreneurial business and finance news from around the globe for small and medium-sized businesses.

They were interviewing Fabienne for an upcoming IFV News episode when she mentioned how she was living life on her own terms. Shea & Marcella thought of us, got permission to share the audio with us and gave it to us to use!

We are BIGG fans of Shea and Marcella and we'll have them on the BIGG Success show soon too, sharing tips on how to use video for your business (like they recently did for Wix Lounge's Social Media Week in New York)…and to find out how they are living life on their own terms.

Now for you. Tell us how YOU are living life on your own terms by taking ownership of your life, so we can feature your story on our show too! Leave a message at 888-455-BIGG (2444), email us: bigginfo@biggsuccess.com, or leave a comment below.

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file | podcast:
http://traffic.libsyn.com/biggsuccess/00644-110510.mp3

(Image in today's post by agastecheg)

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Can Government Be Entrepreneured?

Written on November 3, 2010 by George Krueger & Mary-Lynn Foster in Money

BIGG success is life on your own terms. There are five elements of BIGG success – money, time, growth, work and play. Today we want to focus on money.

We’ve talked before about the single biggest threat to your personal finances. With the election behind us, it’s time for our elected officials to get to work on the people’s business.

But it’s up to us to make sure we keep reminding them what we want. To help frame this discussion, we want to share with you the very first federal income tax schedule here in the United States:

1913 Federal Income Tax Rates

From		To	Rate
$0	-	$20,000	1%
$20,000	-	$50,000	2%
$50,000	-	$75,000	3%
$75,000	-	$100,000	4%
$100,000	-	$250,000	5%
$250,000	-	$500,000	6%
$500,000	+		7%

Source: Tax Foundation

This applied to all taxpayers – single, married filing jointly and separately.

For point of comparison, let’s look at our current tax schedule:

2010 Federal Income Tax Rates

From		To	Rate
$0	-	$16,750	10%
$16,750	-	$68,000	15%
$68,000	-	$137,300	25%
$137,300	-	$209,250	28%
$209,250	-	$373,650	33%
$373,650	+		35%

Source: Tax Foundation

We chose the schedule for married taxpayers filing jointly to stack the deck against the argument we’re about to make. (Single taxpayers actually can still earn relatively more at the same rate.) Also note that these rates are scheduled to increase in 2011 unless Congress extends the “Bush Tax Cuts”.

Before we draw any conclusions, let’s solve a problem with the above comparison. Let’s adjust the 1913 brackets to today using a handy inflation calculator. (The numbers below are actually 2009 dollars, the last year for which inflation data is known.)

1913 Federal Income Tax Rates

(adjusted to today)

From		To	Rate
$0	-	$428,685	1%
$428,685	-	$1,071,712	2%
$1,071,712	-	$1,607,568	3%
$1,607,568	-	$2,143,424	4%
$2,143,424	-	$5,358,560	5%
$5,358,560	-	$10,717,121	6%
$10,717,121	+		7%

Source: Tax Foundation

What jumps out?

Marginal tax rates have increased drastically.
When adjusted for inflation, the top bracket today would have been in the bottom bracket back then.
And the top bracket then only applied to income over 28 times greater than the top bracket today!

It’s not apples to apples …

Admittedly, there is a difference between government today and government then. Government does more today.

Setting aside Social Security and Medicare since they aren’t funded through income taxes, government still delivers more services today than it did in 1913.

… but that’s the point!

Isn’t it time to ask some hard questions? Isn’t it time to ask ourselves IF government should deliver all these things?

We believe the intentions have been mostly honorable. However, it’s the results we need to focus on.

In spite of all this government spending, we have nine cities in our country where more than 25 percent of our people live in poverty. We lag in education in spite of the fact that we spend more per student than almost any nation in the world.

These are just two examples. There are many more.

Entrepreneuring government

The thing that bugs us is that, when you hear people inside the Beltway or inside state government, they act as if there is no possible way to cut costs.

Carl Icahn, the famous investor, once said that he’d never seen a Fortune 500 company that couldn’t cut costs at least thirty percent, if he had the right person running it.

If that can be said about Fortune 500 companies who at least face some market restraints, don’t you think government should be able to do the same?

BIGG success is about entrepreneuring your life. Entrepreneurs make the most of the resources they already have.

We need government that thinks entrepreneurially. We need government that makes the most of the resources already at its disposal. We need government that admits when it can’t do something well. We need to rethink what we expect government to do.

Entrepreneurs have to make very difficult decisions to get the most out of the resources they already have. Government leaders need to do the same thing. The situation only gets worse by delaying.

Your money’s at stake. What do you think?

Image in this post from slonecker