Thursday, April 29, 2010

Build Wealth Quickly - 3 Simple Asset Allocation, Wealth-Building Strategies

If you are wondering how to build wealth, then this “blog” will give you a good overview of the 3 typical ways you can build wealth quickly.

Who doesn't dream of marching into their boss' office one day and resigning without caring about the financial repercussions? Well, you can only do so if you have acquired sufficient assets (wealth) through which you can generate a future income to replace your current earned income. By the way, as a rule of thumb I don't recommend you hand in your resignation unless you have at least 1 and ideally 2 years living expenses put away in liquid assets.

Simply put, to become wealthy over time you basically need to make, save and invest money wisely. The smarter you are at doing this the faster you become wealthy.


1. Investing in Paper Assets (Stocks, Bonds, Funds, Currency)
Investing in "paper assets" is a great way to start building wealth. It teaches you the principals of money management, capital, rates of returns, risk etc. You can invest in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, commodities, and foreign exchange ("forex"). Each of these options presents various levels of risk and reward and requires thorough research before you start. You don't necessarily have to read the Wall Street Journal daily or subscribe to Fortune magazine in order to be a good stock investor.

To help you get started, a basic overview of the paper assets investment landscape goes like this: There are 2 types of investments; ownership investments in which you own part of the asset (a stock is a good example) and loan investments in which you lend money to someone and they pay you interest (a bond is a good example). In many cases, you are looking for growth investments and those are ownership-type investments. (Bonds rarely provide a way to make you wealthy. Rather, they are a way to protect your wealth once you have it). Warren Buffett is a great example of someone who created massive wealth through investing in paper assets.

2. Investing in Real Estate
Real estate is another great way to build wealth. With real estate, you typically buy a property and then make money through selling it eventually for a much higher value than its purchase price and/or becoming a landlord and letting the property. One of the advantages of real estate investing is using the principle of leverage (i.e. a mortgage) to buy an asset that you otherwise couldn't afford. Leverage isn't commonly available in paper assets investing (although you can buy on margin but this can be risky if you don't know what you're doing!).
Real estate investing can be focused on either residential, commercial or land.
Wealth building through real estate involves buying and selling a property -- sometimes referred to as "flipping" or "trading" and often involves "rehabbing" a property (i.e. fixing it up) -- to give the fastest and best rate of return.. However, landlording is a more standard approach that requires more time to build wealth, generating a small income in the meantime from the rental income after subtracting all expenses. Donald Trump is a great example of someone who created massive wealth through real estate investing.

3. Starting, or Owning a Business
Starting, or owning a business is another common wealth-building strategy. Starting a business doesn't always make you really wealthy right away. It takes time and energy to build the income of a business and its capital value, but it can make you wealthy over time if managed effectively. Therefore, if you have previous experience of running a business it can sometime makes more sense to buy an existing business and simply run it better.
Want to know how to build wealth starting or owning a business? Find something that you love to do and that solves the needs of a target market. Then sell that product or service through relentless marketing and sales. Create efficient systems to sell more, more often. And work towards growing the value of your business by making it less dependent on you so that you can eventually sell it to a new owner. Bill Gates is a great example of someone who created serious wealth by starting a business.

Whatever way you chose to start building wealth, always remember those words from the mouth of antihero Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street..."Money never sleeps pal".
Different asset class values will shift in time (daily/monthly/annually) and according to market cycles. It's also a good idea to scrutinize your assets and then take steps to rebalance your portfolio periodically. You also need to match risk to what stage you are in life. So, want to know how to build wealth quickly? It's simple: Take your hard-earned money, save as much as you can as you go and then choose a strategy (from above) and consistently, month by month, year by year, apply yourself to these wealth building strategies.

Remember, building wealth doesn't happen overnight. But with education, time, diligence, research and hard work, you can go from wondering how to build wealth to actually becoming wealthy and enjoying your millions! Mastering wealth building will ensure that money you earn isn't flitted away carelessly and that you get to secure your financial independence!

By Keeks Cunningham

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

What's the best thing that’s happened to you today?

A friend of mine got a blackberry bold 9000 today form AT&T and she asked me to help her reset her os, knowing that I have been in the blackberry frenzy for some time now.

After resetting her os I found out that they mistakenly sold her a locked phone. I was about to go give her back the phone when I decided to do a little "googling" and see how easy it was to unlock it.

I found out that it cost from $15.00 - $20.00 to get an unlock code aka MEP code online and also locally if you are not an official AT&T subscriber.

But fortunately I came across a website called BlackBerryMEP.COM, which offered to get me the code if I could provide them with my imei and mep id.

I thought it was a joke, but complied anyway since I had no other option. Within minutes of sending them a mail I got a reply from them asking me to add the mep id since I only sent them my imei. So I did that and was about to leave the office when I got another email from them.

To my surprise the email had the mep unlock code in it. I took the phone out, put in a local sim card and tried the code, asta la vista . ... the darn code worked!!!!

I promised to write a review about their site, so here it is . . . I would have written a review anyways. . Wink!!!

So thank you very much “BlackBerryMep.COM”

Friday, April 9, 2010

7 steps to keep your RIM Blackberry healthy and happy

Your Blackberry device is just like your PC and behaves exactly like it. Storing more and more data on your device can reduce its performance and slow it up considerably. Here is a list of things that you can do to keep your Blackberry device up and running at optimum health.


1. Delete all Unnecessary Applications: You might have installed more applications than you actually need on your Blackberry device. Your Blackberry would run faster and perform better if you keep only those applications that you actually use.


2. Delete all Unimportant text and email messages: Having old and unimportant text and email messages on your device can consume too much space and memory. Therefore it is good idea to delete such messages from your device.


3. Make use of Content Compression to free up space and memory: Your Blackberry comes with a feature called "Content Compression". You can use it to compress all your Blackberry data including messages, contacts, calendar entries, tasks, and memos and free up memory.


4. Get rid of your multimedia junkies: Multimedia files such as music and video files take up too much space and memory. Therefore it is a good idea to move them to an external memory card such as a micrsoSD card or delete them regularly from your device.


5. Optimize your Calendar appointment settings: The Blackberry Calendar stores a lot of information such as past appointments, meetings and other events. Therefore it is a good idea to adjust calendar settings to keep only the most up to date data. If your calendar stores important data and you don't want to get rid of, then it is a good idea to backup your data before deleting it.


6. Clear your Event Log regularly: Just like your PC, the blackberry device keeps log of all events and processes running on it. With time this log can grow considerably in size and take up too much space and memory. Therefore it is good idea to clear your Event Log regularly.


7. Clear your Browser's Cache regularly: Your Blackberry web browser keeps information of all sites that you visit in its cache. Clearing it regularly can result in better performance.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

iPass? The best present and future alternatives to the Apple iPad


When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad he was quick to shake his finger in the nose of the other devices out there attempting to fill the gap between cell phone and full-sized laptop, and in particular those market-dominating netbooks. In Apple's opinion, the iPad may be the gadget for surfing the web, watching movies, reading books and running apps, but it's surely not the only game in town. And if you aren't sold on the iPad, but happen to be someone who's looking to buy a secondary computing device to use while traveling or while simply lying on the couch, your choices at the moment come down to netbooks and... well, more netbooks. And that's not such a bad thing, especially if you need a feature Apple's tablet can't offer, like multitasking, a keyboard, or Flash support. So, before you get up on Saturday morning and run off to purchase that iPad, you may want to peruse the best current (as well as coming) alternatives we've rounded up after the break.

THE RIGHT NOW ALTERNATIVES
$499: either a 16GB, WiFi iPad or....


Toshiba Mini NB305 ($399)

It's quite hard to pick a single netbook for under $499, especially considering you could nab at least two of them for the price of an entry level iPad. However, the $399 10.1-inch Toshiba Mini NB305 continues to be our pick as the best all-around netbook. For $100 less than the entry-level iPad you get a device with 15 times the storage space, and a full fledged Windows 7 that lets you write an e-mail while simultaneously listening to Pandora and checking the weather. Oh, and did we mention the VGA webcam for making Skype calls?

$629: either a 16GB, WiFi + 3G iPad or...

Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t ($549)
Why choose between a tablet and a netbook? The $549 Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t and other netvertibles don't force you to. With a swivel-capacitive touchscreen the S10-3t morphs into a tablet with its very own NaturalTouch software interface, and with Kindle for PC loaded up you've got a color e-reader with 250GB of storage space. Yes, we were bothered by the viewing angles of the display and the tablet experience needs some love, but when it's in normal clamshell mode you can easily fire off e-mails without having to pick up a $70 peripheral keyboard. And Lenovo isn't the only one in the netvertible game – we have high hopes for ASUS's $499 Eee PC T101MT that will be available starting next week.

$829: either a 64GB, WiFi + 3G iPad or...


HP Mini 311 ($199 Verizon, $399 HP)

If you're spending $800, you should think about a higher end netbook, like an Ion-equipped Mini 311, or Intel ULV ultraportable. The 11.6-inch Mini 311's NVIDIA Ion GPU certainly has what it takes for mainstream gaming and full HD playback, and like the others it can handle multiple applications, play Hulu vids from your browser and store more than 64GB of your data. Like the iPad, you can opt for more than just WiFi with 3G from Verizon. We did the math and while it turns out to total $919 for the year with a $60 per month data plan, the 64GB iPad costs $1,189 over the same period of time.

THE FUTURE / VAPORWARE ALTERNATIVES
So netbooks may be the best alternatives around right now, but the tablets are a comin' -- or at least that's what we've been told by a number of major companies. Unfortunately, most of these aren't shipping or even priced -- and the most promising member of this group hasn't ever been officially announced. But if you're the type to hold out hope, each of these is bound to present an interesting alternative to the iPad if and when they arrive.


HP Slate

Truth is we don't know much about the much-hyped HP Slate, but we can firmly say it has USB connectivity, runs Windows 7 and supports Flash out of the box. The questions surround the software, and given the fact that Windows 7 wasn't created to be a slate OS, we're crossing our fingers that HP is coming up with something awesome to put on top of it. Regardless, the quite svelte looking 10-inch, multitouch tablet is rumored to be priced around $549, but it looks like we will be waiting until early this summer to swipe our fingers all over it.

Notion Ink Adam
Talk about baking in tons of cutting-edge technology into one device: the Notion Ink Adam has both the latest Tegra processor, and a 10-inch touchscreen made by PixelQi, which means you can turn the backlight on and off for saving battery life. No doubt we're intrigued with what we have seen from Notion Ink, but with no word yet on pricing or availability of this one and now rumors of Tegra 2 issues, we're skeptical of its real viability.

Fusion Garage JooJoo
When you set aside all of the Fusion Garage / TechCrunch hubbub, the $499 JooJoo is actually quite a compelling tablet. With a larger screen than the iPad, the 12-inch, Intel Atom / NVIDIA Ion powered tablet promises full Flash HD playback and has a pretty nice looking interface from what we've seen so far. We're worried about the battery life given our issues with Ion netbooks, but it shouldn't be too long before we've got our full review up.

Dell Mini 5
While the Dell Mini 5 is a bit smaller than most of these tablets and its five-inch form factor is closer to a phone than anything else it could just hit the sweet spot of portability. We've been impressed with what we've seen so far from the Snapdragon-powered Android device, and the prototype we've been toying around with is both snappy and responsive. However, as AT&T managed to totally ruin Android on the Dell Aero, we're more than nervous that all of that potential will be washed down the drain when it's finally announced.

Microsoft Courier
We figured we'd save the best for (almost) last -- and by best, we mean the product we're most intrigued by, yet know the least about. We can't even tell you if the Courier is a real product or just a collection of ideas mocked-up as an exercise, but the bits and pieces we've seen have us hoping Microsoft is hard at work on this dualscreen gadget. We've heard rumblings of a launch later this year, but honestly, for all we know, it could all be a Microsoft backed prank.

Chrome OS Tablets... and unicorns
We have no idea what Google's Chrome OS is actually going to be like, and we have even less information on if it'll make it onto tablets. But more than a few companies have hinted at such devices, and now that the iPad's 10-year run atop the rumor charts is over, we've got a feeling those whispers are just going to get louder. There's no doubt that waiting on some of these tablets could be on par with waiting on Petco to sell unicorns, but why do that when you've already got dozens of great choices -- yes, including the iPad -- that you can buy right now?