I still sit here in a personal dilemma, where the hell to go next? I have eleven books written in various stages and unpublished; the obvious easy course of action would be to get one of those completed and up for sale as quickly as possible. The prequel to the Lollipop is “The Candyland” and sits with a built in audience of readers now that I have sold almost a hundred copies of that book series. I pull it up daily and do a few edits and find I just can’t get into it at6 this time.
I watch and listen to what is going on around all of us and feel I have something important to offer that is not a made up story of a guy vanquishing serial killers in the worst way possible. I also have been making much progress on “Black/light” but again it just doesn’t seem to ring my bell right now and I have a very difficult time staying with it as well.
As I see what is happening to everyone around me including my own children and grand-children, I just can’t get my mind away from the fact that the country I grew up in and knew so well is gone. My biggest dilemma is how in the hell I communicate that, especially to my own kids and what and how their lives will change as well. I can’t find a single person so far that is not affected by this current economy in one way or another.
The old rules of how we acquire success have changed so much; I fear they have no clue how to go about chasing the dreams they have. Their dreams are no different then the ones I had at their age, and I was able to realize to some degree great success for a very long time. A how-to book is very easy for me to write and create with my extensive experience and training in both business and money. I know how to make it and blow it just like everyone else by the way.
If my children try to do what I did in the same way I was able to achieve it they will fail miserable, the methods and avenues I had are closed off and I fear they will never return in the same way. Credit, assets, wealth and jobs have all changed in such a dramatic fashion, that the old rules and game plans are obsolete and need to be revamped across the board.
When I worked my first good job at nineteen and could save money at 10% interest in a conventional bank, I purchased my first new car and home without a co-signer. I was able to pull out an American express card and buy whatever I wanted (as long as I paid the bill in 30 days) and had three other credit cards to go along with that one.
Those are things my children will not be able to do in the current credit climate, and do they understand that? That is the question that bothers me daily and haunts my dreams. They will not live the dreams I was allowed to, if they do not change their thinking and game plan to fit today’s circumstances.
The changes we are going through are not going to be just a short term type of change. This is a generational shift that will take decades to come back to where it was for me, and it may never come back to the same way it was. If you think it will ask; a few of the house flippers who now sit in bankruptcy and mortgage default how soon they see it coming back.
The old ways of leveraging real estate are gone and aren’t coming back; even Donald Trump can’t find money for current or future projects as he openly stated recently on Larry King live. And if you know anything about economics, when the government sucks up capital like a Giant Hoover vacuum cleaner, good luck in getting in front of that line.
Those factors are exactly why I dropped my other book projects and began the “Wealth building 101” series. In that book I clearly explain how anyone who keeps money in a conventional bank today is using old methods and ideas that will no longer work in today’s climate. The current money market rate is 1.65 percent. Inflation is going to go thru the roof and money that does not receive gains is lost money and opportunity.
I suppose all I’m doing is trying to justify in my own mind why I should abandon fiction and stay with reality. I wrote “Double Down Bounce: How to make huge profits in a volatile stock market” out of sequence because an old friend now living in Florida wanted to view those specific principles. He as well wanted to entice me out of my comfort zone and go back to the strip club business in some fashion or another.
My advice to him was to save his money and go for the stock market, that was weeks ago and the DOW is now up 30 percent. When I recently spoke to him and asked if he took my advice he suddenly had a bunch of marbles in his mouth and suddenly couldn’t speak clearly anymore, I fear he did not take the advice. Since gold is up 12 bucks today (he is a gold merchant) I’m sure he is not hurting anyway. Gold however is up only a few percent, like three, and the stock market is straight up at a whopping thirty points.
In the book; I describe many ways to change habits and take advantage of new ways to keep, grow, and raise money, I did not however go as far as I wanted in the basic understanding of how the life we knew is gone. Nor was I able to give deep insight into how to navigate the new money streams that are all around us. We either learn how to dip into those streams or we will wind up renters, and low-end worker robots seeing our saving, equity and what’s left eaten up by the up coming inflationary cycle.
“How do you know that is what’s going to happen Mr. Smarty Pants?”
That’s an easy one to not only forecast but see happening right now, Gold up, Stocks up, Commodities futures are up, yet interest and money availability is flat as hell, if not dead as a mackerel. In a normal cycle like this (way back when) you could go borrow on a signature up to twenty grand. Interest you pay is way up yet the interest you earn has never been lower. Even collateralized loans rates are up with the exception of subsidized housing and auto loans. To get those you better have a 720 to 750 credit score.
The old market of sub-standard credit loans are no longer sellable to investors, which is why home builders and auto dealers are underwater and drowning, or going bankrupt. Anyone who doesn’t see this happening is in a dream state and under the anesthetic of the old market economy. If you don’t get that here it is plain and simple; the government sucked up half the GDP of the nation in less than six months. And yes they did it to save our collective asses.
Without the actions taken you would have had no insurance, banking (both mortgage and loan), and car companies left to send your money to. We not only looked into the financial abyss, we slide down the side of it and almost completely collapsed the capital markets around us worldwide. The old ways of how to live a good and prosperous life have changed forever.
Even if you get to keep your job for the time being, don’t for a moment think about raises, benefits, retirements and free health insurance like the old jobs offered. The capital markets shrank by a factor that is almost incalculable and the effects will remain with us for an entire generation. Don’t believe me? Look at a 5 year Dow chart and at the bottom check out the money that flooded out of the market in mid 2007, the informed rats rushing off the sinking Titanic. What were left was uninformed traders and profit takers keeping the blown up balloon in place, that lasted for about a year until the small amount of funds left could no longer withstand the inflated overblown prices.
I’m not sure if the above chart will show up or not until I post it. If you can’t read it here I’ll try to post it to my photos or my BlogSpot. Forget the retail stock prices above look at the volume of cash at the bottom, it fell off a cliff in mid 2007 the big money around the world bailed out five trillion dollars US were sucked out of the market in only a few days.
If you didn’t get out then, it was yours or your brokers own fault, Stevie Wonder could see that crash coming. There was at least 16 months of fair warning to get the hell out… From 14,000 all the way down to 6500, who could have known? Anyone who knew how to read a stock market chart knew. Just past 28 on the chart you can see the bottom fall out in trading money, but the remaining buyers keep bidding up stock prices, creating an artificial bubble. The bubble collapsed initially at 19 and then down past ACV (actual cash value) at the 06 mark near the end of the chart.
Now the Dow is back up to 8700 today and heading well toward its new benchmark of 9000 and it won’t stop there. How do I know this? The volume at the bottom is increasing everyday, but it still remains 3 trillion under where it was in mid 2007. At current volumes only a 9000 down can be sustained, if the volume continues to grow the top can re-chart new territory past the 9000 mark. If all this is too daunting, then you need to read my book “Double down bounce: How to make huge profits in a volatile stock market.
So I guess I’m off my fiction writing for awhile and on toward finishing the ten books in the “Wealth building 101” series and finish that project. Right now the financial health of my friends and family are far more important than silly made up serial killers, and how much I enjoy vanquishing them.
“I’m spent” Austin Powers…
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