Category: Op-ED

Winning Your Own Lottery | Boaz Rauchwerger

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Many years ago, I worked in radio and television news. A lot has changed in the broadcast news business in recent years.
This past week, especially later in the week, the biggest story in the U.S. appeared to be the record $640 million up for grabs in the Mega Millions Lottery. Some people waited in line for up to 4 hours in order to buy tickets.
Even though the odds of winning the big prize were something like 170 million to 1, many people wanted to buy a chance because they thought about the dramatic changes they could make in their lives with instant wealth.
What if we could set up a process that, in time, could literally make it possible for all of us to win our own personal lottery?
Contrary to what I used to think, it’s not how much we make that makes the difference. It’s how much we keep.
Otherwise, how would you explain the story about a little old librarian in Vermont, who never earned a lot of money in any given year, who retires after 40 years with several hundred thousand dollars in her bank account?
Maybe she decided to keep some of the money she made every year.
So, what if each of us was willing to make a few changes that might make it possible to win our own personal lottery? What would it take to do that? Here are some options:
1. Live a little below our means and pay off all debts.
2. Stop charging and pay in cash. What’s wrong with saving for something instead of charging?
3. Save some money every day, even if we start with a dollar a day.
4. Prepare a sack lunch to take to work instead of buying lunch every day.
5. If possible, ride a bike to work. That’s great exercise and you’ll save the gas.
6. Make a list, for 30 days, of where every one of your dollars is going and look for ways to trim back unnecessary expenditures.
Implementing such ideas, I believe, will raise the odds on each of us ultimately winning our own personal lottery.
You are special. You are unique. You are destined for greatness! Have a powerful day!
A Personal-Lottery Affirmation
I keep more of what I make because I make good decisions with money.
Boaz Rauchwerger is a speaker, author, consultant and trainer. He is also a contributor to the Lifetime Network program,’ The Balancing Act’.www.boazpower.com

Death By iPad | Peter Mehit

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I think iPads are really cool. I like that they’re instant on, broadband connected and can deliver the world to you in a compact little package that is easy to use and carry. They are well made, reliable and look really cool. There is no question that they represent a huge change in how information and entertainment is accessed, opening up a deeper internet experience for millions of people. Like all technology, however, there is the other side, the unintended consequences.

The more ubiquitous the iPad is becoming, the more demands there are on our already short attention spans. I was attending a meeting about positioning your business for angel investors. I was a tad late, and entering from the back of the room, my attention was drawn not to the presentation at the front of the room, but to the sea of little illuminated rectangles in front of most of the participants. It stunned me so much that I stood and watched as the contents of the screens changed faster than the presentation. This was not lost on the presenter who looked defeated at the end of his time.

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What Are You Retiring From? | Boaz Rauchwerger

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There’s a lot of talk, especially in light of the developments of recent years, about retirement. Unfortunately, many people have lost much of their retirement nest eggs due to problems in real estate or in the stock market.

I received an interesting note the other day from a long-time friend, Dana Borowka, of Lighthouse Consulting, in Santa Monica, California. He offered a different view of retirement. Here is what he wrote:

“Last week I was thinking about retirement and what it means. The thought came – what am I going to retire from? Then the idea came – Today I’m retiring from fear and stress! I’ve shared that with a few people and the look on everyone’s face is – of course. They loved it.”

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2012 – A New Chance to Become | Peter Mehit

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A new calendar is a blank slate. All of the missteps of the prior year are erased and nothing but possibility is before us. What will happen in the next year? To a large extent, it’s up to us and how we think. Most of us set goals, make resolutions, about what we want to happen in that vast gulf that is represented in that empty calendar. We tick our desires down in to-do list fashion: “Lose 20 pounds.” or “Find a new job” or “get a new car”

Time will pass and we will make judgments about how well we did with our goals. We will succeed at some and fail at others. Most of us will fight to a draw, the opportunity represented by January’s blank slate missed.

Over the past year we have been surveying ‘success’ literature looking for common patterns. To our surprise, we found them hiding in plain sight. From Napoleon Hill’s epic survey of industrial titans, “Think and Grow Rich” to the ‘scientifically’ based “Psychocybernetics” to “The Master Key” which is the basis for “The Secret”, all of them are saying the same things even though they were written in different times for different audiences. To us, it breaks down to three basic principals:

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Part Two: A Digression on the Arcana of Financial Frontiers | DIS Magazine

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In his wonderful TED talk, Kevin Slavin, a well-known game developer with an interest in algorithms, explains why we’ll never master the ramifications of such complex math. In regards to the Flash Crash, he says,

All of a sudden nine percent [of wealth] just goes away and nobody—to this day—can even agree on what happened. Because nobody ordered it. Nobody asked for it. Nobody had any control over what was actually happening… We’re writing these things that we can no longer read. We’ve rendered something kind of illegible. And we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world that we’ve made…

When you see this kind of behavior, what you see is the evidence of algorithms in conflict, algorithms locked in loops with each other without any human oversight, without any adult supervision.

The only power we have over these algorithms, he suggests, is to press the “red button that [says] STOP.” Unsurprisingly, most leaders on Wall Street lack this kind of humility.

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A Good Outcome | Peter Mehit

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I have recurring insomnia. Not every night, or every week, but enough that I am always playing catch up. One recent Saturday night I was sitting in our upstairs office, cleaning out my e-mail and watching You Tube videos when two loud collisions broke the silence. No screeching tires or car horns, really no noise at all until that unforgettable sound of rapidly folding metal and plastic shattering.

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The SBA Doesn’t Loan Money | Lydia Mehit

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Q. Should I get a loan from the SBA?

A. You can’t get a loan from the SBA, but you can get a SBA loan guarantee. Come again?

Well, first off, the SBA does not loan money, so you can’t get a loan from the SBA.

The SBA guarantees a large portion of the loan made by the bank.  This means you have to negotiate two sets of paperwork and get two approvals before you get funded.

Q. What is the benefit of a SBA loan guarantee?

A. An SBA guarantee gives the bank the opportunity to fund a loan that doesn’t meet their commercial requirements. The SBA guarantees the bank will receive their funds even if the borrower, you, defaults on the loan.  The guarantees range from 50 to 90% of the loan amount.

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