Gill Fielding - Wealth Company

Half time!

Well it’s difficult to believe that I have written a Gill’s Gem every day for six months now. That has amounted to about 6,500 words per month – so almost 40,000 words since the 1st of January.

Writing the Gems has been a real ‘eye opener’ experience for me because I have learned:

1. I started the project thinking that I had no spare time. I have a busy life, lots of business activities, 3 kids to get ready for school, 5 cats to feed and work to do. And yet I have now introduced a routine whereby I get up, flick through the days press and think about the topic for the day whilst the kids eat their cornflakes. I then wave them cheerily off to school at 8 – and go straight to my computer, start writing and the Gem is normally on the web site by 8.30.

So if you don’t think you have any spare time to start creating wealth – you DO! It’s just a case of prioritising your time differently and implementing a system

2. You become what you concentrate on! Now I know this is an old truism but when I have concentrated on reflecting the daily media – I have become less positive about money – the constant, negativity in our press just drags me down.

So use the media for information but use your instincts and beliefs to drive your financial attitude!

And, probably most importantly:

3. That there is nothing new or complicated about creating wealth. Over the six months I have covered about 150 different days worth of material – and it all boils down in to the 5 basic and simple steps that we reflect in our philosophy. There’s financial repair, maintenance and preparation (the access road), investments in property, equities or business (the three lanes of the motorway) and there’s reflect, correct and re-evaluate (the service station).

So, stick to the basic, tried and tested, simple steps of wealth creation – and stop looking for the ever new, ever whizzy pill to pop – because there isn’t one!

Here’s to the next 6 months of learning – and thank you for reading!

Property poser

Every week there is some scare story in the press regarding property and generally the article turns out to have no basis in fact, but one was so ludicrous last Saturday that it made me laugh out loud.

The headline proclaimed: “House Prices to drop 12%” – but then immediately underneath was a smaller headline stating: “But some areas will see increases over next 5 years”.

So a contradiction then even within the headlines and of course the article said that house prices rise at different paces in different parts of the country, and some areas see bigger rises than others.

Clearly, there is no way anyone can tell what is gong to happen to the property market as a whole, because the market doesn’t move as a whole – it moves specifically, locally, regionally and in reaction to localised supply and demand, and in conjunction with national government policy. That’s why I get so annoyed at these national predictions of gloom because there will always be a property rising in price somewhere – if you only know where to look and how to manage it.

And of course there will always be a property somewhere that is falling in value – and our skill as investors is being able to spot that and evaluate it appropriately, and avoid it. This is relatively easy to do if you do your homework, understand some basis principles, and get some education on the topic.

What a pity that the majority of our popular press don’t understand that.

Hooray for Enterprise!

I am delighted to read that, at last, the government is to do something about educating people for enterprise and Gordon Brown has announced a summer camp scheme for kids (12 to 18) where they can learn the basic skills of business. These lessons will include information on how to draw up a business plan and how to get finance – hooray!

It has always been a shock to me that the government doesn’t concentrate more on education of this kind because IF they did then the appalling business failure rate that we have would surely improve. (As we know 80% of new start businesses fail in the first year).

Of course if the business success rate improved then the government would get more income in taxes and have to pay out less to people in support of one kind or another. That’s just business common sense – what a pity it has escaped the major brains of the government for so long.

Still I won’t end on a negative note because I am so pleased about this initiative – let’s hope that it leads to other financial and business based educational programmes.

Time is money?

I couldn’t find my watch last Friday and after initially being disconcerted about it, I eventually found it very liberating. I went through my entire day, doing chores, attending meetings and appointments and I managed OK without my watch and the only ‘mistake’ I made was being 10 minutes late for my 11.30 meeting.

It made me realise that having a constant awareness of time wasn’t necessary – and normally, like everyone else, I am constantly checking the clock to make sure that I wasn’t late and that time wasn’t running out. But a day without a watch proved to me that time still flows whether you are concentrating on its passing or not and in fact the time flowed more freely when I wasn’t watching it.

Of course, that is just like money. My belief is that money should flow in and out of our lives freely without stress. Sometimes people concentrate so hard on having money, making more money and keeping money that it just doesn’t flow for them. These people get so intent on becoming rich that they forget to relax or let go and give sometimes – and it’s very difficult to become wealthy that way.

Time is a limited resource whereas money isn’t – but sometimes we have to learn to relax our feelings and not become too obsessive about them passing and then we can enjoy them more.

………… oh and I found my watch.

June Money and McEnroe

I was lucky enough to have my lunch with John McEnroe yesterday as I was at Wimbledon (and yes I did see the Henman match), and rather than ask him about tennis I spoke to him about his approach to wealth creation.

Unsurprisingly, he adopts the straightforward multiple streams of income approach, so during Wimbledon fortnight he ships himself and most of his family over to the UK.

He works for the first week for the BBC and for the hospitality company that organised the lunch yesterday. For the second week he works for the BBC and the American TV company that covers Wimbledon (who also employ his eldest son as a runner). In addition to that he writes a daily column for the Telegraph and occasionally pops on to the tennis court to play in the over 45 men’s doubles. Every one he works with has to agree to him working with all the others in the loop and by the end of the fortnight he has had a two week holiday with his family, being in an environment he loves, talking about the subject he knows innately, whilst maximising all opportunities on the financial front.

I am not sure how much he might earn in this fortnight but just taking the men’s over 45 doubles, he will earn £5k if they get knocked out in the first round and £10k if they reach their seeding position of 2. He has everything timed to perfection and the whole McEnroe machine is honed to get him in the right place at the right time – a perfectly fluid business system with one product.

On a personal level I found John personable, quick witted, responsive, intelligent and communicative – particularly when talking about his kids. However, he is surprisingly thin and looked tired and a bit dishevelled (obviously they spruce him up for the tele), and the odd thing I noticed was that his shoes fastened with Velcro not laces -  odd for a grown man in this country but perhaps not odd for him.

So like all ‘famous’ people I have ever met he was just normal and ordinary and I was incredibly impressed.

Have a great weekend.

Thursday thoughts

Did you know:

1. That the average income for a UK family last year was £29,328 – and the average expenditure was £30,784 – that’s a shortfall of £1,456 per family – oops!

2. That £100 million pounds went unclaimed last year from the National Lottery – I’ve never really understood the nations interest with the Lottery and now I’m even more perplexed!

and finally:

3. Insurance companies have reported a craze they call ‘vanity vandalism’ which has arisen from the £2 billion worth of fire damage caused by the overheating of heated rollers and hair straighteners. Apparently there have been 4 million claims at an average of £6,500 since the devises became popular – just think we could resolve a fair amount of world debt with 2 billion – all it means is that we need to have unstyled hair!

June The Blairs…

Now I have given the Blairs and their property investing skills a rest recently and the mistakes they made with their recent London property purchase are well documented.

But I can’t resist just one comment on their other property investment – the two flats in Bristol which caused all the fuss a year or two ago. It transpires that the flats are now worth £230k each when they were purchased for £262.5k each in November 2002.

So they have lost £65k on their money in 3 years.

It just goes to prove that you can be as clever as you like but that doesn’t necessarily make you a great property investor. However, proper education and training can help – as I have discovered that the main reason these flats have fallen in value is because they are next door to a petrol station and a nightclub. Now any basic property investment course that I am involved with warns you of these two problems in the first basic sessions – when I list the 14 pluses and the 14 minus points to consider when looking at any investment.

Oh dearie me.

Funny Money

I have learned an awful lot about money just by writing these gems every day. I have kept this up for six months now and as I sat in bed this morning thinking about what to write I realised that I had become transfixed and beholden to the system.

Let me explain.

My basic belief is that money is fun, exciting, pleasurable and abundant for all, and I believe also that my fundamental beliefs about money as listed are what makes me different in the financial arena. Those beliefs are what have made me wealthy because I have no fear of money or any sense of scarcity in any way.

However, over the last six months I have studiously read the press every day – including a double dose at weekends – just so that I could write something topical about money for the Gills Gem section of our web site – and I think its beginning to affect me. This is because every day I am inundating myself with what the media write about – and that tends to be negative, scare mongering and panic driven. Of course, in the main I disagree with the media in general and say so in the gem, but it has reduced me to become a Victor Meldrew character who moans about everything. It has also forced me to concentrate on what I am reading and writing – which as I say is mainly negative.

We know that we can manifest what we concentrate on and by concentrating on what the media write about I am becoming like them.

How scary is that? But I hope that by realising it I’ve stopped myself in time!

Missing Millions

There has been a lot of press coverage over Gordon Browns determination to pinch our missing millions. Apparently there is about £20 billion sitting unclaimed in bank accounts, building societies, dividends, and insurance pay outs – and this is without the billions of pounds of unclaimed tax allowances and rebates sitting at the Inland Revenue.

This doesn’t surprise me.

When I do wealth weekends I often ask people to do a summary of their assets and liabilities and in almost every case people underestimate what they have, and they ‘forget’ about pieces of land, spare shares, odd bank accounts and inheritances. I think this is because as a rule people are so scared of money that they block out huge chunks of information in order to cope with their daily financial life. Sad but true: and now Gordon Brown is going to have a jolly good go at claiming all that money for the government.

So let’s make sure he doesn’t get any of our money and start reclaiming it for ourselves. If you think you might have lost an asset or money somewhere start by checking out the following web sites:

          www.fundsreunited.com

and:

         

          www.uar.co.uk (unclaimed assets register)

Good luck and happy hunting!

It's The Country Life For Me!

I like the Country Life magazine – one of the best things about going to the Dentist is the old copies of Country Life strewn around the waiting room. This time however I am referring to the Country Life last week which had a fantastic article about Who Buys Britain’s Best Country Houses – and what a turn up for the books that turned out to be.

The research they reported compared 1985 houses with today and they revealed that in 1985 £2 million (their bench mark for the research) would have bought you a grand Georgian House with 250 acres – and the same property would cost £10 million today. In 1985 the purchaser of a £2 million house would have either inherited wealth or be a captain of industry or a merchant banker, and would be between 45 and 55.

How times have changed.

Nowadays that grand property is bought with money from:

·        inherited wealth (10%)

·        industry (10%)

·        finance (20%)

·        city traders, and professionals such as lawyers (20%)

and,

the biggest number of owners – at 40% - in the best Country House category are now – entrepreneurs in their 30’s and 40’s – which was almost unheard of 20 years ago.

How times have changed and what incredible encouragement for us 40 something entrepreneurs!

Have a great weekend.