Here is where I list my action steps- Basic steps for creating a wealth foundation for life. Since I am a not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, I post these after the fact, when they are accomplished.
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Phase 1 Personal Change
Action step One – Make A Decision
Its an odd thing that this is listed as a step. The thing is, amazingly, no one makes a decision for financial freedom. A solid decision, at least to. People mostly don’t make any decisions at all, they live by expectations- if it comes, great! If not, I should have tried, harder.
This line of thinking, isn’t going to amount to anything. So, you need to make a decision- to burn your current situation and form a new one.
A decision can consist of the following: faith, commitment, or follow-thru, (sometimes) urgency, and a goal. They all end up connecting together; forming synergy(lack of better terms, sorry).
Faith provides the energy to motivate yourself, which connects to commitment. Commitment makes yourself stay focused, through the often boring and mundane tasks, that most self help/ wealth creation books don’t talk about. Urgency stands on its own, while a powerful motivator; it sure does create loads of stress. Succeed or go hungry, lose your house, etc. This one optional 
You can still get things done as long you keep your level of commitment high.
Going back to Commitment, it makes you stand and see your goals become reality. You know what a goal is right?
As you go about my actions steps, keep reminding yourself of your decision to breakthrough and create(hopefully) a new world of opportunity.
Share your new decision carefully. Everyone has a Aunt who has a failed venture of selling water filters, and has piles of her defeat in the garage. Your different. You will break past the point of failure with a creation of a strong foundation, followed by a good plan. If you take things in a controlled manner.
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Action Step Two- Get Researching
After making a decision, its now time to begin some action by getting educated. If you haven’t already, its time to begin researching a “wealth mindset”. Start just with how wealthy people think, then later you can move onto specialty topics. A lot of times, some self help books seems to be filled with not much info, so start with the library before filling your bookshelf with junk. I would avoid any e-media, other than free, for the time being. The time limit for this, depends on how many books you can read at a time. If you are reading about one book per week, I recommend stopping research in about 3 months. At that point, you should begin to build onto the muse section(more on this later) and taking other action. If you continue to look for the “perfect solution,” it will never come and you will get stuck in something called analysis paralysis. Researching things to death, isn’t healthy, so try to hold a limit and begin taking action. Plus you are committed to the decision you made, you are breaking it if you stay idle researching.
Here are some good books to get started:
Books on mindsets
The Cash-flow Quadrant
Robert Kiyosaki
(this is the best one of the series, if you wish you can spend time on the others)
Think and Grow Rich
Napoleon Hill
(the ultimate classic on wealth building. A must read)
The 4-hour Work Week
Timothy Ferriss
(This is a recent bestseller, and for a very good reason. Gives an idea behind starting a muse)
And if you have some time
The Millionaire Maker
The The Millionaire Maker guide to Wealth Cycle Investing
The The Millionaire Maker Guide to Cash Machines
All by Loral Langemeier
( excellent read on building a real wealth plan. This is the author system I will follow in this blog, with tweaks)
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
Dale Carnegie
(the classic about self help, written by the same guy who did a great book about dealing with people)
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Action Step Three- Redo your Financial Picture, Save 10%
While in action step one we decided to change for the better, we now must begin to change habits that have been sabotaging our financial dreams and preventing wealth creation. For us, we need bootstrapping income, without the issues of a strict lifestyle or a budget enough to drive a person mad. I like to go to the movies or even buy a computer part, without thinking I sabotaged our financial goals or no groceries this week(ouch!). Thing is, at the same time money does need to be saved then invested in wealth creation, thus going paycheck to paycheck isn’t going to do well when the right opportunity comes up when its in place. It stinks not being able to act.
If you are “free birding” your money away, its time to sit down and figure out what amount of spending must go where and so on. Figure out your unchanging bills, then a range for your variable ones(electric utilities and maybe long distance phone bills) to see how much it cost to live per month. And also its time to set some saving goals. The internet makes opening a saving account with just one dollar possible. Such places like ING Direct or HSBC Direct make this possible. So how much should be saved? According to the classic book, The Richest Man In Babylon, the book recommends 10% of your take home pay or of any earnings(aka, all your keep). David Bach of Automatic Millionaire, recommends a similar idea, 1 day of pay from work per pay period. While most tell you to work small starting as little as 10 dollars, pay yourself, I recommend to get out of that comfort zone as fast as possible, since we are trying to create wealth in a few years, not 45 years(you can do that with other things). If you could save 100 per week, you will have 5,200 saved up. That may seem a lot, but its workable to reach over several months.
Now, I know with a 4.00% rate, your not going to be saving a million. That isn’t the point! The point is to give yourself income to fund your operations, then later on, your more powerful money making assets.
There is one trick to take advantage of- direct deposit. Make it go directly into savings once you get it. Do not touch it. This way its done at the beginning, not when you paid off all your bills, and having nothing for savings
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Phase 2- Setting up your shop
Action Step 4- Stop Mindset Reading/Researching, Begin Business Researching and Planning
At 3 months, to 6 months, its time to stop reading about wealthy mindsets. Books like the rich dad series, really doesn’t give a solid plan. Its now time to begin planning a small business(or muse, I call it, taken from Timothy Ferriss book -4HWW) to get your feet wet. In mindset training you might of been exposed to real estate type businesses, or a multi level marketing business to build your wealth. These businesses are more asset creation. This can be done, I recommend later.
Anyways, back onto topic…
First take a good look at your talents and see how you can translate that into something that can fund your assets and larger business creation after some time. If you need some ideas, pick up an issue or two of entrepreneur, and Home Based Business Opportunities. On the web check out TrendWatching.com. See if there is a small home-based business you can emulate. Ideally, you want your muse to become 80% on autopilot, i.e not needing your constant attention once it gets moving. Once you think you found a path spend quality time researching it online. Someone bound to written about it or a business model like it.
Congratulations, you are going to now take theory and take it to reality if your still committed.
Here are some ideas I came up with: cafepress screenprinting(create your own clothing line), a photo retouching service, affiliate marketing, elance/craigs list programmer(small tasks, maybe with code pregenerated for common requests, setting up a mysql server, etc.), a computer fresh install service(go to small businesses, backup data, and reinstall everything for them, to remove viruses, etc.) , and email/skype based trainer in any topic(language classes come to mind, at least on skype)
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