As young children, we are very quick to point fingers at others (or other things) for our problems, some of us are fortunate enough to have parents who will call us out on it, others do not. 

The other day, my daughter was told repeatedly not to run on the floor around a community pool.  As you would expect, she soon came up to me crying because she had slipped and hurt her knees.  After examining the damage I told her to stop crying and get on with her lesson because she had been told not to run and this is what happens when you don’t listen.  As she walked away, I noticed that another parent one seen over was looking at me like I had just commited a crime.  I chose not to say anything, just sat back and waited.  Soon, just before the lesson was about to start, my daughter came back up to me and stated that she should have listened and she’ll never run again by the pool cause that’s how you slip and hurt yourself.  As she walked back to her lesson, I turned back to the previously disapproving parent and smiled and winked.

The following piece is by Alexander Green whose posts I have shared before.  Alex takes this idea a bit further, enjoy!:

One of the hurdles I see with today’s social environment is the lack of personal accountability for one’s situation.  If I am to make someone else responsible for my happiness, I will be forever disappointed because only I have the power to choose how I will react to any action, word or event.  If I allow myself to react negatively, be offended, etc., then it won’t matter what anyone else does, the outcome is pre-determined.

The article below, describes how one person sought out a positive change once they realized that “they” were the problem..

Happiness Is Your Problem – Bottom Line Publications

via Happiness Is Your Problem – Bottom Line Publications.

In the post below, Dr. Steve Sjuggerud examines the impact of such a path on people who had planned on relying on interest income for their nest eggs.  Steve is the author of the investment newsletter True Wealth,for more information or to subscribe to his free service, Daily Wealth, visit:  http://www.dailywealth.com/ .

This week, interest rates in Germany fell BELOW ZERO.

It’s true… If you bought a six-month government bond in Germany earlier this week, you’d have to PAY THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT interest.

Unbelievably low interest rates are not just a German problem…

Interest rates are near zero in the world’s major developed economies… In Japan, short-term government bonds are paying 0.1% interest. And short-term government bonds in the U.S. are paying 0.01% interest.

In short, it is definitely a zero-percent world today. The question is, how long can it last?

The answer is… a very long time.

If you need interest income, you don’t want to know how long interest rates could stay near zero.

I’ve written about this possibility a lot in recent years…

Back in December 2008, I wrote a DailyWealth titled “Are 3% Mortgage Rates on the Way?” At the time, it sounded preposterous… Mortgage rates spent most of 2008 in the 6%-6.5% range. Now here we are, with mortgage rates at 3.9%.

Six months ago, I wrote another essay on the topic. It showed how we could eventually see mortgage rates drop in half. At the time, U.S. Treasurys, which influence mortgage rates, were paying 3% interest. Today, they’re paying 2% interest.

I’ve updated a chart from that DailyWealth showing how U.S. interest rates are at record-lows… But they could go lower, based on Japan’s historical example.

In the chart, I pushed Japan’s interest rates forward by a decade, to compare their path to ours.

Japan faced its “lost decade” one decade before we did. And its government attacked the problem the same way our government has in the United States, with dramatically lower interest rates and dramatically increased government spending.

Twenty years later, Japan’s economy is still not growing. It still has extremely low interest rates. And thanks to all the government spending, Japan now has the world’s highest ratio of government debt-to-GDP. (Ominously, Japanese real estate has not started a recovery, either.)

Back here in the U.S., you can hope that interest rates go back up so that you can once again earn income on your savings.

But hope is not an investment strategy.

I personally believe that we have a lot of incredible investment options right now, because of this zero-percent interest policy around the world. But holding cash at the bank and hoping for higher interest rates is not one of those options.

We could have zero-percent interest rates for another 10 years. Japan is proof. And the world is currently following Japan’s example.

Interest rates have been at zero since late 2008. It’s now 2012. And the Federal Reserve seems committed to keeping them at zero “for the foreseeable future.”

Can you deal with zero-percent interest for years going forward? If not, what are you doing to change your strategy?

Helping Others Helps the Helper – Bottom Line Publications

via Helping Others Helps the Helper – Bottom Line Publications.

So with that, the final resolution of the 5 we will see through to completion is to make a difference in someone else’s life.  This can span a very wide range of activity from sponsoring a child overseas and regularly corresponding with them to actual adoption of a child that needs a good home.  There may be a co-worker with great potential that you mentor (this by the way is one of the great rewards of owning your own business) or a friend or neighbor who values your skill and knowledge.  There are numerous organizations set up to connect you with others such as Common Bond, Kinship.org and alumni organizations and charities are always looking for help.

Whatever it is you decide whether formal or informal; make sure that you write down what it is that YOU wish to accomplish.  Make it deliberate and be sure to schedule time for it or you will not succeed. 

I made this resolution the last one because I believe that this is the one that completes the picture and truly sets you on course for a rich and fulfilling life!

The world’s biggest and most powerful agricultural companies are still trying to convince you that their soy products are healthy… but there’s a problem.

It’s not traditional soy.

You see, Asian farmers used to consider soy to be a type of fertilizer, not a food. They recognized that most of what’s in a soybean is indigestible to people.

They only started eating soy after discovering that natural fermentation processes make soy okay to eat. That’s why – to this day – Asian cultures ferment their soybeans in a traditional way to make soy foods like natto, miso, tempeh, edamame and tofu.

It’s made by a simple process that Asian cultures have been following for thousands of years.

But this is a far cry from the soy foods made from the genetically modified, heavily processed ingredients that are in nearly every product you can buy at the market.

Instead of “soak, steam, ferment,” most food manufacturers follow an industrial crushing process called cracking that breaks down the raw, genetically modified bean to thin flakes. Then the flakes are “defatted” by percolating them like coffee in a petroleum-based hexane solvent to extract the soy oil.

The remains of the flakes are toasted and ground into meal.

For soy flour, the oil then goes through a process of cleaning, bleaching, degumming and deodorizing – all to remove the harmful solvents and soy’s horrible stench.

The sludge that forms in the oil during storage used to be considered to be a waste product. Now you know it as soy lecithin.

In other words, the part of the soy that’s left over as garbage after the petroleum processing and bleaching is the heart-destroying oil that makes up the trans fats in every kind of junk food you can think of.

Sound like something you want to eat?

When processed like that, soy products have huge amounts of natural toxins that block food digestion, and also absorption of essential vitamins and minerals.

But when they’re fermented in the traditional way, they retain powerful lignans that may help reduce your risk of cancer.

In fact, the average woman living in East Asia eats about 10 times the quantity of soy foods as the average woman in the United States. Yet East Asian women have lower rates of hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer than women in the United States.

There’s no sure way to know why this is true, but the speculation is that it’s because of what they eat. And they do eat a lot of traditionally made soy products.

You can make traditional soy foods too. It’s easy to do. All it takes is three simple steps: soak, steam, ferment. That’s it.

For example, to make natto, you simply:

soak the soybeans in water, until the beans stop swelling.
steam them so the beans become soft but don’t lose their skin.
lay the cooked beans on cooked rice straw
tie the package shut
leave it out and let a little heat and oxygen ferment the soy naturally

The Chinese have been doing this for thousands of years. And they discovered that mashing up the soft soybeans and mixing them with certain minerals would make a sort of curd… now known as tofu.

Most of us have a formal or informal bucket list, so the Q in Quantify, Prioritize and Execute has been completed.  So for this year, resolve to prioritize your list based on where you are in your life right now and pick one thing that you can accomplish this year, then actively schedule time in your Outlook, Blackberry, IPhone or Day at a Glance planner to spend in the pursuit of that passion.  If you don’t consciously plan your time for fun, you’ll always be telling people how you’d “like” to do it but “life keeps getting in the way”… 

Even if you can accomplish more than one, pick one and see it through to completion before moving on to the next item on the list. With four other resolutions to keep, you will have more than enough activity to keep you occupied.

Now it’s time to practice guitar…..

Taking the view that every interaction is an opportunity to teach I would usually take the bait and ask them “why?” I needed to pay them more.  Ultimately whatever direction the explanation started in, it always ended up at “cause I need to make more money”. 

But instead of ending it there, I would ask them one last question; “what would change tomorrow if I double your pay?”.  By the responses I’d get, you could tell that they had never been asked questions like that before and they would usually come up empty with their attempted response.  Our products were made on an assembly line, the workers snapped pieces of plastic together, or used air tools to turn screws or bolts into a whole.  They really couldn’t work any faster, most of the equipment had been error proofed to prevent defects from getting through so short of ceasing any sabotage that we weren’t aware of, there was little they could do to justify a 100% increase in the cost of performing their task.  I would show them 2 of our products or talk about different cars and ask what they’d be willing to pay for one over the other and why.  Most of these people would be gone within a few weeks, leaving us for $.25 an hour somewhere else.  But some would stick around and start asking “how” they could make more money.

It was about this time that I started thinking about the concept of the Personal Portfolio.  We all have or are at least are aware of investment portfolios. The value of the portfolio is highly correlated to the quality of the assets held in the portfolio.  And while we consciously value each other’s personal portfolio every time we go through a stack of resume’s, most of us don’t manage our money making potential in that way.  How many resume’s have you looked at where the applicant displayed a history of performing the same tasks over the course of their work life while doing little or nothing to increase or enhance the skills and knowledge that you’re looking for in an employee?

What is the value of your portfolio?  You might be a good marketer, but can you sell?  You might be a good engineer, but can you write persuasively?   If you were looking to change careers, do you have something else to offer that could allow you to make that change without a severe reduction of income? 

So the New Year’s Resolution #3 will be to add one thing to your resume’ (or personal portfolio) that increases the value of your skills and knowledge to potential clients, employers or customers.

I resolve to attain my CFP designation by year end.  Please feel free to share your ideas in the comment section.

Easy right?

So all we have to do is either increase the amount of assets or decrease the amount of liabilities to make the left side of the equation work.  The problem that I have with most people trying to execute this strategy is a matter of scale.  They simply associate “Net Worth” with wealth and they associate wealth with millions, or at least hundreds of thousands of dollars and tell me that they don’t make “that kind of money” to take this resolution seriously. 

This is unfortunate because just like good health, accumulating wealth is a lifestyle, not an event and it is so much easier to make the lifestyle change now with $10 per week than waiting until you have $100 per week.  The dirty little secret is that for most of us, we will never have that $100 per week because we will find ways to spend every pay increase we receive. 

Start with a little now; do a quick and dirty budget and choose amount that you wouldn’t even notice like, $10 per week.  Then use that $10 per week to either increase your assets or reduce your liabilities.  What you do with the money is up to you; have you maxed out your 401K and IRA?  Are all your credit cards paid down? Do you have a mortgage? 

Savings accounts are paying very little and the stock market is a little too volatile for some, so possibly making extra principle payments would make more sense.  If you have a Financial Advisor, they should be willing to sit down with you and help you with the calculations you need to make a sound decision.  Then you should act to automatically set aside that money by increasing the monthly payments or setting up weekly transfers to a savings account that you wouldn’t normally access.

The key then, is to take every future pay raise and allocate a portion of that money (after tax) to this funding mechanism.  I recommend 50% of each raise be allocated to net worth and your Advisor can help you properly apply that money between savings and debt as the size of the allocation increases.  I’m already doing this with my daughter where she splits her allowance between two piggy banks, one that can be opened and emptied at any time and one that can be only opened by breaking it.  Amazingly, as the second bank gets heavier and heavier, she has become more likely to put more of her allowance in that one versus her “spending account”.

Start this week and watch what happens in a year….