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Entrepreneuring Your Personal Finances

Written on September 22, 2009 by George Krueger & Mary-Lynn Foster in Money

personal_finance Bigg success is life on your own terms. You are the entrepreneur of your life. Entrepreneurs look at the world through a different lens than do large company CEOs.

For example, large companies and small companies use different financial models. Large companies generally have the ability to raise large amounts of money when they need it.

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For small companies, it’s much more difficult. So it’s more critical for small business owners to watch their cash flow. For us as individuals, our financial model is much closer to the entrepreneur’s.

The two decisions

There are two types of decisions which we must think about: investing decisions and financing decisions.

For large companies, these two types of decisions are independent. They decide what they will invest in. They determine how they will finance their firm.

In an entrepreneurial firm and for us as individuals, these decisions are interdependent. We invest in the things we can finance. It could be a new business or a piece of real estate. But it could also include a new car or a new house.

If we have an idea for a project, we first must either have the needed financial resources already available or we have to sell someone on funding it.

If neither of those is true – if we don’t have the money or we can’t sell someone on funding it, we can’t do the project.

Now let’s look at four ways to think entrepreneurially about your personal finances:

Bootstrap
Entrepreneurs understand that they have limited resources. They recognize it, but still make the most of what they already have. You can carry that same attitude into your personal finances.

Retain earnings
This is what we call it when a business saves money. Pre-fund your projects when possible. If you know that you need financing to make an investment, why not finance it yourself? That’s financial freedom.

If cash is king, reserve borrowing capability is queen.
Protect and preserve both your credit rating and your credit capacity. Then you’ll have the ability to fund your bigg opportunity when you see it.

Create value with your projects
Simply stated, Value = Cash Flow ÷ Cost of Capital.
Entrepreneurs must understand that capital comes with a cost. It may mean giving up a stake in the company. It may mean sharing the money with partners or bankers. In all cases, it requires a reasonable return on the money invested.

As an individual, your capital comes with a cost as well. You have to share some of the money you will make in the future with your funders. So just like an entrepreneur, you need to understand if the benefit you will receive from the project makes it worth the money you’re investing.

To determine this, look at the incremental cash flow from any project you consider. If the return on your investment exceeds the cost of the capital needed to fund it, you should do the project and vice versa.

Let’s say you have an old car that’s requiring a lot of repairs. You see that you can save money if you buy a newer car and pay interest. That’s a project that’s worth doing.

Smart entrepreneurs and wealthy people look at every cash outlay as an investment. They want to make sure they’re getting enough value out of the investment to make it worthwhile.

Now that value may be somewhat fuzzy – like it makes you happier or adds to your sense of well-being. In any case, thinking entrepreneurially about your money leads to bigg success.

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Thank you so much for reading our post today. Please join us next time when we’ll talk about the long and winding road to bigg success. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

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Freedom Or Security – Which Do You Choose?

(Image in today's post by srbichara)

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Reading and wRiting and aRithmetic

Written on August 19, 2009 by admin in Personal Growth

It’s Back-to-School season so we’re doing a ten-part series on lifelong learning. We’ve kicked it off with two shows on reading and writing. Now we want to talk about arithmetic.

We’re going to take a little different tack today than we have with the last two shows. We’re going to talk about two specific things we need to know when it comes to arithmetic.

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Why not listen & read? Click the purple player to hear George & Mary-Lynn on The Bigg Success Show: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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These two things both involve our personal finances. That’s why they’re so important.

The power of compounding money

The first one is compounding. This can be a little complex so we’ll offer an example that’s so simple we won’t even need a calculator!

2 + 2 + 2 = 6. 2 x 2 x 2 = 8.

If we add two together three times, we get six. If we multiply two by itself three times, we get eight.

That’s the power of multiplication. And money multiplies if you manage it properly.

Stuffing it in your mattress

That’s just numbers. Let’s apply it to money to make it more tangible.

Let’s say you have $2. You stuff it in your mattress. Next year, you get another $2 and put it in the same mattress. The year after that, you do the same. Now you have $6 in your mattress.

But you haven’t earned any money on your money.

Investing it

Let’s assume that you could double your money every year. Now understand that we’re just doing this for the purpose of illustration.

We don’t know of anything you can invest in and double your money every year. If there was such an investment, it would likely involve taking a whole lot of risk.

So you start with the same $2 that you did before. Only now you invest it and earn 100% on your money each year. Instead of $6, you would end up with $8.

And you only invested $2 one time!

If you invested all $6 at the times suggested above, you would have $14 at the end of the period.

That’s the power of compounding interest. It’s how interest works for you.

But it’s a two-edged sword. It can also work against you. We’ll talk about that more in just a minute.

Building Net Worth

The second thing to understand about arithmetic is the basic accounting equation:

Assets – Liabilities = Net Worth.

Of course, our goal is to increase our Net Worth. If we understand this basic equation, we can quickly see there are only two ways to do that.

We increase Assets faster than Liabilities

We decrease Liabilities faster than our Assets are decreasing

Let’s look at the extremes to keep it simple:

If we increase our Assets without increasing our Liabilities, our Net Worth increases.
If we decrease our Liabilities without decreasing our Assets, our Net Worth increases.

A painful vacation

Let’s get away from words and look at something tangible. Let’s say you borrow money to go on a vacation.

You don’t increase Assets at all but your Liabilities increase. So your Net Worth goes down. You lose financially. You may reap psychic returns but that’s a different post!

It’s the pain we talked about earlier. You have to pay for the vacation over time. You also have to pay interest on the money you borrowed. This is a situation where compounding works against you.

So what’s the key?

Find ways to increase Assets without taking on more Liabilities or invest in Assets that earn a return higher than the cost of your debt.

Money multiplies if you manage it right. That’s a path to bigg success!

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In case you haven’t heard, there’s a fantastic new book out. It’s called Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. This book shows you the path to grow and maintain the most important asset you can possess today, your network.

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Thank you so much for checking in with us today.

We’ve talked about the 3 R’s we learned in school. Please join us next time when we begin talking about the 3 R’s of bigg success. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes.

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00463-081909.mp3

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