Concepts to Thinking Rich

                                                 Think Rich 

                        Primary Concepts

There are three primary concepts that have to be embraced before you can make yourself rich or practice thinking rich. These are; Putting your natural inclination to fear risk, and the fear of the unknown into perspective, overcoming the tendency to procrastinate, or to put it another way, the failure to take action, and realizing you are just as deserving as anyone else

Fear

To overcome the fear factor we have to break the problem down into manageable parts and make some decisions. The first problem is that money is emotional. Money is wrapped up in our daily lives. How do you reduce the emotional effect when making your investment decisions?

The rich people I know separate their investment and personal accounts. They consider money used for investment or for business separately from personal or household money. You actually do that already! At work, when you are spending the company's money, you handle the situation much more carefully and without emotion because it not your money. The same is true for borrowing money. Borrowing to make money is a different decision than borrowing for a personal purchase. One is a decision based on factual data and probabilities and the other is an emotional decision. I have my money separated into three parts. 1. Personal accounts to include checking and savings. 2. Long term savings accounts, that include IRAs and annuities. 3. Investment account, with each investment separately accounted for. My family thinks of the investment accounts like each is a business, because they are. Separating the money helps get rid of the emotion associated with money.

Fear of the unknown. I overcame my fear of the unknown by choosing one area of investing and studying up on that one area. I chose single family rentals, (to include duplexes), as my starting point. The first house I bought was at on Dickson street in San Antonio, Texas. After a few of these rental house deals had been completed and my family soon realized that there was no big disasters. Our confidence grew along with our abilities and the fear went away.

Fear of loss. The trick here is to realize the risk of loss can be reduced, thus putting the fear of loss into perspective. Depending on the type of investment you choose, there are methods to reduce the risk of loss to a reasonable level. For real estate investments you would do the research, know the area you are buying into, buy quality properties, use good advisers, buy property and liability insurance, and so on. For a stock investments you would research the companies, look for companies that pay dividends, buy quality stocks and use stop loss orders to reduce the risk. For mortgage investing you would buy from a reputable broker and buy only first mortgages, on properties located in good neighborhoods. Each investment type has similar means of reducing the associated risk. You have to put your loss into perspective and realize that so long as you take a few precautions and do the research, the probability of loss is not likely to ever be 100%.

Procrastination

When I ask people why they haven't started working towards getting rich? They typically have no answer. If I persist with the question the answer most often is, I do not know how, or fear of failure. When I try to get them to be more specific, they find it difficult to do so. The problem is they just do not know why they procrastinate. Here's is my theory. I think the problem is that they are not even sure where to start. Investing seems so complicated and overwhelming. We all are afraid of the unknown.

Making money is a process of figuring out what to do and then doing it. Most people work at making a living until they get a career and begin to make enough money to cover the cost of living. Then they go into idle mode, doing just enough to get by. Most people set up an automatic employer sponsored retirement plan or cross their fingers and hope that social security will be adequate to provide for their old age. They occasionally think about getting rich, but once the monthly living cost is covered they keep putting off getting rich. They procrastinate.

Deserving

Realizing you are just as deserving as anyone else will get rid of one more road block that stops people form getting rich.

You are deserving, you are smart enough and you can do it. People born into wealthy families just assume when they become adults that they to will live a life similar to their parents. What is more important is that all their relatives and friends made the same assumption. Because everyone was on the same course, everyone did what they where suppose to do and sure enough they where living the good life too.
I was born into a poor family of twelve kids. I was nine before I knew most people made their sandwiches with two pieces of bread. One Saturday my mothers sister came to visit and she showed her home movies and slides of their vacation trips. Mostly national parks and big distant cities. These people seemed awfully rich to this ten year old boy. I though about that all the next week and came to the decision that these are my relatives, if they can be rich, why can't I? It was then I realized that I am just as deserving as anyone else, I never questioned myself again, I just assumed I would be rich and deserved to be rich. At the time I had not a clue how important that realization was.
What changed was that I started substituting “YES for “NO”, yes I can, why not me, sure I can, and so on. It wasn't long before people would say, go ask Jim he's always up for anything. People started making assumptions about me because I appeared to lack doubt or hesitation. It wasn't true, what I had was confidence in my abilities and a wiliness to assume responsibility. Because people assumed I would be successful at what ever I did, therefore they helped me and I was successful at most things I did. Funny thing, that was the edge the rich people had, you can by your actions and attitude accrue it by thinking rich.

Most people fail to get rich because they never learned how. No one taught us about getting rich, not our high schools, not our colleges, not the universities. Rich people learned how to get rich from their parents or were self taught. If they where lucky they had a mentor. We have to learn how to think rich.

Most of us hesitate when we are dealing with an emergency situation such as during a medical emergency, we look for help, we call in a doctor or paramedic. The difference between you and your doctor is that the doctor learned what was needed to treat patients and went through an extensive on the job, supervised training (internship) to be able to treat the patient and handle medical situations with confidence. I think we can agree that with the same training and education you could be a doctor.

Making money is the same way, if you knew what to do and when to do it, you would then have the confidence to use your resources to become rich. Treating patients and making life and death decisions has got to be a whole lot scarier than investing for your future. Choose one are of investing and buy a book on that subject and read it. The more you learn about that area of investing the more confident you will get in that subject.

Collages are a good example. What you learn in college, at least the first two years is how to learn. You can take that college methodology of studying, outlining, and implementation, and implement your own get rich plan.

Learning to get rich is like being a college student. They begin the freshman year not sure of what they want to do with the rest of their life or what they want to be and maybe just a little unsure of their abilities. Four years later most of them are confident and ready to tackle the world. The professors only drilled and offered encouragement. The students taught themselves and each other. They learned to think and respect their conclusions...now, do that with money and you are thinking rich.