2 Million Dollar Bills

It is hard work to become a millionaire. This is especially true if you do it the hard way by starting at zero. There are a few secrets about how to get there that you need to know.

The first big secret, although it is not that big of a secret, is that you are going to have to go out there and take some kind of jump to do it. I was tempted to say risk, but that is not quite the right term. Taking a job has risk. You never know exactly how long you are going to have that job and no job is safe.

Having a job alone is not going to cut it. There are those jobs that will get you there there, but they are doctors, lawyers who bill out at $250 per hour and commercial real estate brokers who do $10M deals.  These people are the exceptions. The rest of us need another way.

We all know someone who has been laid off. I live in Houston and can remember when Enron went under. There were a lot of smart people who had nothing to do with the scandal there. There were programmers, office assistants, IT people, and accountants who thought they were on a good place. All of a sudden they saw their retirement accounts go to nothing and were looking for work. This was the big one that caught headlines. How many other cases where a series of circumstances dried up all the cash of a company that had been in business for 50 years? How many times was a new executive get hired that made some ill-calculated decisions that cost millions of dollars where the company responses eventually lead to a “reduction in force”?

You need a job, but never become comfortable with the idea that this is what is going to carry you over to a financial threshold. Even if you worked your life there and put in you maximum amount into your 401K, you are still not looking at millionaire status until many years down the road. What will be the value of a million dollars then?  Relying on savings and 401K money also means you have to survive the inevitable market corrections. Nothing is more discouraging than to see eight years of savings vanish because of “irrational exuberance” in the stock market.

All that being the case, you need to take some type of action to ensure your own financial security. The big question becomes what should that jump be and can you actually do it? Eventually you need to put down the copies of the “how to get rich” books and spend your time putting the plan into action.

For those who know what the target path is, it good for you. It is now time to start working. Others have a few ideas and probably more questions about the viability of our ideas than facts. For these people, the best course of action is to take the smallest and least risk components you can and start there.

A good example of low risk item to do - take you existing house, move out and lease it. This is more work and hours on your part, but it takes on less risk. Odds are if you bought a house, you have lived there for a couple of years. The market value is higher than what you paid and the note is at a lower amount than what you can get if you were to get a note for an investment property on the open market right now. Another way of saying all this, the cheapest way of buying a house is to get it for yourself.

Finding another house and packing up the kids stuff is no treat, but you now can now start building equity in two places and earning some cash on the side. When the market values go up, and they will, you gain twice as much as before. I have done this rotation several times and a significant piece of my wealth comes from this. Most people have a significant amount of their wealth tied up in their houses. Why not take advantage of that to its fullest.

One can only add additional rentals every few years. The in-between times are spent saving enough for the next down payment. In other words, there is time on your hands where you can do more.  It is not just about doing one thing. To create wealth, we have to constantly look for new opportunities. If we get involved in something that becomes a full time effort, by all means we should focus all of our energy there. But for the new entrepreneur, some experimentation is most likely needed to find your true money making calling.

Take inventory about what you are truly gifted at. Do you mind going up to complete strangers in book stores and coffee shops and engaging them in meaningful conversations? If yes, you need to be in a multi-level-marketing business. I cannot do that and do not want to do that so I have to look elsewhere. I only found this out after failing at a multi-level-marketing. Do you have a specific interest in something and enjoy hunting down suppliers of that? If yes, then consider opening an online store or finding an online channel to sell through.

I have always been a big sports fan. I even went through a period where a friend and I traveled a few parts of the country to visit some of the baseball stadiums. I really enjoy learning about the park history and some of the nuanced statistics of the game. One of the businesses I got into was buying and selling baseball tickets. This lead to buying and selling tickets to other sporting and concert events. This very quickly became a lucrative business for me. I now hire other people to take care of certain aspects of the business. Not only am I making money from doing it, I turned it into another business by teaching people how to do it.

The ticket-selling business was not the first or only other business I had started. Many others flat out did not work or I lost interest. The fact I lost interest proved to me that it was a not a good choice to begin with. When I did have interest in the business, sometimes not matter how much interest you have, if there is not a market, you cannot do anything about it. Buying and selling tickets solved both of these for me.

For me it was buying and selling tickets, for someone else it could be hair care products of children’s toys. The point it is to find an interest you have and discover the ways to formulate a business plan around it.

Start small. Keep the risks to a minimum and most important of all do something.

This article was written by Greg Cox

About the Author:

Greg Cox is a classic entrepreneur. He has combined some education, street smarts and some hard work to build several successful companies. One of his companies is a ticket brokering company. He also teaches other how to be ticket brokers and provides them with the tools they need to succeed. Learn more about the business at www.myticketbiz.com

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I have finally made it to Barbados and the next stage of my game plan for making 2 million dollars is on track. My goal is to develop a variety of business interests in Barbados, which will help me to become a millionaire. I plan on achieving my goal of making 2 million dollars within 5 years, can I do it? Yes I can do it, the only person that can determine whether I will succeed or fail is, MYSELF.

Talk is cheap and anybody can say that they are going to become a millionaire and then they just sit around and wait for it to happen. In fact I use to do the same myself, how can you expect it to happen, when you a are wage slave. You will never become financially free as long as you work for the boss man and your life and finances are dictated to by someone else.

I have in the past being involved in business opportunities which basically were not worth my time and effort and were complete failures, and it took me a long time to get back on track and start working towards something more than just being a miserable wage slave, stuck in a rat race, wasting my life away, Don’t Let Past Business Failures Stop Your Dream of Running a Successful Business.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that the   the rat race was killing me and the only person that could change things was, you guessed it, ME. I was like everyone else in my work place, I would spend my time moaning about how much I hated the place, the pay was crap, I could never get my holidays when I wanted them, they were making us work harder and harder, they were really trying to get the last drop blood out of the stone.

It was I suppose fortunate that I received a nasty knee injury while I was working, which resulted in me being off work almost a year, when my work place very kindly made me an offer of just over £15,000 to leave. THANK YOU VERY MUCH. I was never going to go back anyway! I eventually used my time off work wisely, I formulated my escape plan, I have Finally Escaped the Rat Race, But I Aint In Paradise Yet!

I wanted out of the UK, my wife and myself had a family house in Barbados and we both like the Island, so it was a logically move to relocate to Barbados. I then had to figure out how I was going to make money. I had to look at my previous college and work experiences and figure out if I could turn them into business ventures which would support my family and help me to achieve my goal of becoming a millionaire.

In order for me to achieve my goal of becoming a millionaire and make the 2 million dollar bills dream a reality, I needed to formulate a game plan that would allow me to work towards achieving my aims.

My main skills and what I like to do is plan and organize things, as well as the advertising and promotional aspects of a business.

I knew from personally getting married in Barbados last year and the fact that know one on the island could give my wife and myself the kind of wedding we wanted. Every wedding planner we talked to in Barbados was offering what I would call a conveyor belt wedding, they all lacked inspiration and Innovation. There was no way we could leave such an important day as our wedding day, in the hands of people that were clearly  not on the same wave length as us. 

My wife had worked as a wedding planner in London but she didn’t want to have to fully organize her own wedding because she knew the amount of time and effort that it would take up, she wanted to enjoy the lead up to the wedding and the wedding day itself without the headache of overseeing and organizing everything herself. But at the end of the day we were left with no choice but to do everything ourself’s.

My wife and myself pooled our skills and we created an amazing wedding, it involved a huge amount of thought, time and effort to create our vision of what we wanted.

My main skills were dealing with various suppliers and arranging to get them delivered to Barbados from America. I also arranged the catering team, marquee and created the outdoor ambiance at the venue. My wife dealt with and arranged all the more creative and design elements of the wedding. We pooled our skills and created one of the most amazing weddings ever in Barbados, for people that aren’t rich. Celebrations Caribee was born!

The first business venture was created and is called Celebrations Caribee, which is a wedding and event planning company. Through myself and my wife, who is my business partner, weddings and events will reach a level of creativity, innovation and quality that has been lacking in Barbados until now.

Another company that I have formed is called Awaken Paradise Property Consultants, the goal of this company is to arrange, organize and oversee the building of properties for people. I can source land, build or renovate properties to a high standard, which is done to UK standards and timescale’s, not Bajan! I can arrange top quality builder, architect, and a trustworthy lawyer.

Awaken Paradise Property Consultants came into being after seeing family members and friends of the family being ripped off by a variety unscrupulous builders. Too many people have been ripped off in Barbados by happy smiling builders that will promise you the world, take your money and end up building you a dangerous house or in some cases not building anything at all. I have seen too many returning nationals and tourists alike being cheated out of their hard earned money.

I also have a tourist related business which will offer something unique for people coming to Barbados, this will be live for the xmas season, if everything goes according to plan.

Making your business legal in Barbados is similar to setting up a company in the UK, as you are probably aware, as soon as you start using the services of a lawyer you end up spending lots of money. But it is worth it to have the start of your vision made a legal entity.

It is fantastic to see my business dreams and aspirations starting to take place and the first stages of the 2 million dollar bills game plan taking shape.

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I think most people dream about becoming a millionaire, and by millionaire, I mean, having a million pounds in cash sitting in your bank account. As Del Trotter said for all those years,  In Only Fools and Horses, “this time next year we will be millionaires”.

In all seriousness it may have been a comedy, but good old Del Boy, was actually constantly buying and selling things with the dream, the ambition and the desire to become a millionaire. That is probably a lot more than most people who have the dream to become a millionaire!

I know from personal experience how difficult it can be to transform the desire to become a millionaire, into finding a successful business opportunity, which I can use as a springboard to making millions. I suppose most of us prefer the dream because its easier and doesn’t involve any real effort, it acts as a distraction as we go about our daily routines.

It was only recently that I have personally being putting the effort into developing business opportunities. Like a lot of people I spent most of  my life working as a wage slave, happy with my reasonable comfortable roof over my head, two holidays a year, going out for meals and socialising when I wanted. Life wasn’t too bad.

I sat down one day and analysed my life and thought, shit!  The way things are going my pension will be worth nothing, I could lose my job any time the company figures out another way to combine even more jobs into one, in order to get even more blood out of the stone. Analysing my life really made me think about the long-term future and what lay ahead. It wasn’t pretty! It wasn’t inspiring! It wasn’t what I dreamt.

I had to stop dreaming about becoming a millionaire and start doing something towards making it become a reality. My self-appraisal of my life and by looking into the crystal ball as to what life may have in store for me, gave me a reality check.  What I knew and didn’t like was that I wasn’t in control of my own destiny.

The day I started putting together the ideas for my Barbados based businesses, which shall be going live in July was truly inspiring. I have slowly but surely cleansed my body, mind and soul of the negative forces, which were stopping me from moving forward on the road to success. We all have to learn how to control our minds to its full potential as opposed to allowing our minds to control us.

I have just recently registered a new domain name for a web site, which I shall be launching at some point this year; I need to get Barbados up and running first.  This business idea which I shall for obvious reasons not go into to many details, it was inspired by reading about some crazy business ideas which made the creators serious money. My theory is a simple one, I feel I have a unique idea, and don’t see why I cant sell 100,000 at $10 per sale and wolla I have made $1,000,000.

As Del Boy says, this time next year we will be millionaires, it may not be next year, but I’m definitely on the right path to becoming a millionaire. I hope this article can inspiring anybody out there that need more out of life and want to start achieving more. All I can say is, start spending more time thinking about possible business ideas, step out of the box and dare to dream.

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