The Money Tree Formula

I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news.

First, the good news.

If you’re like the average person, earning at least $25,000 a year, then, in your lifetime over a million dollars will flow through your fingers. That’s a lot of money. In other words, you’re a lifetime millionaire.

Now, for the bad news. If you’re like most people, you’ll spend it all, and, after a lifetime of earning, will end up with almost nothing.

How can that be?

Frankly, nobody teaches us about money. We receive no formal education in the most critical of all life skills–how to become financially successful. Did you ever attend a class in all of your public education entitled, "Money 101?" Why isn’t there such a mandatory class in every elementary school?

How have you learned what you know about money? You picked it up, a piece here…a tip there. You absorbed attitudes from your parents, from the media. You observed the examples of friends. You proceeded through trial and error…the school of hard knocks. What you learned was haphazard, mostly wrong, certainly out of context. Most of the books you read about the subject probably overwhelmed you with details or bored you with useless facts. If you’re like most, you’re confused and frustrated.

Yet, money is one of the most important subjects of your entire life. Some of life’s greatest enjoyments and most of life’s greatest disappointments stem from your decisions about money. Whether you experience great peace of mind or constant anxiety will depend on getting your finances under control. Your relationships will be greatly affected. 90% of all divorces in our society result from disagreements about money. Understanding money–how to make it and keep it– is absolutely essential to your life, to your relationships, to your happiness, to your future.

Still, there are some people who seem to be naturally good at managing money. The same million dollars flows through their fingers, and, they seem to know how to keep some it and even make it grow. In some cases, a hundred fold more than the average person.

Do these people work 100 times harder? Are they 100 times smarter? Of course not. They just know how to play the game. You see, money is a game. A very important game. If you know the rules, you win. If you don’t know the rules, you lose. As someone said,

"Wealth is when small efforts produce big results.

Poverty is when big efforts produce small results."

In this book, you will finally learn how to play the money game…and win. If you follow these simple strategies, you can retire a multi-millionaire…while enjoying a banquet of prosperity throughout your life. You will learn a simple system for controlling your finances. You will learn how to invest your surplus funds without losing sleep at night. You will learn how to create multiple streams of lifetime income. You will learn how to oversee your growing financial empire on as little as ten minutes a day. You will learn how to leave a financially secure future to your family and loved ones.

You may wonder how I qualify to be your instructor.

I started myself in the seventies, perhaps just like you, with a dream of becoming financially independent. After graduating with a Masters Degree in Business Administration (MBA) from Brigham Young University in 1974, I began investing in small real estate investments and parlayed a tiny nest egg into a large multi-million dollar net worth in a few short years. Along the way, I also suffered my share of setbacks. I’ve not only made millions but lost millions…and made them back again. I know from the school of hard knocks what works and what doesn’t.

I shared my powerful systems in the #1 New York Times bestseller, Nothing Down: How to buy Real Estate with little or no money down. This book became the all time real estate investment classic used by beginning investors ever since.

I also wrote two other major bestsellers, the #1 New York Times Bestseller, Creating Wealth, and The Challenge. In promoting this last book I made the bold statement:

"Send me to any unemployment line. Let me select someone who is out of work and discouraged. In two days time, I’ll teach them the secrets of success and in 90 days they’ll be back on their feet with $5,000 cash in the bank, never to set foot in an unemployment line again!"

The Challenge is the true story of how I selected 3 people from the unemployment lines of St. Louis, Missouri and taught them the secrets of financial success…and, yes, they were able to achieve incredible success in 90 days. One of the couples went on to earn over $100,000 in the next 12 months. To celebrate, I took them on Good Morning America with me.

What I am about to share with you is the result of having worked with thousands of successful people over two full decades. I have seen people go from living on the streets to living in mansions…from driving a taxi to being driven in limousines.

Although my most famous book is about real estate investing, this book will show you how to create wealth in many different ways…from multiple sources. Actually, there are three great wealth creation mountains. I call them Money Mountains. Each mountain is distinct from the others, and yet, each share similar characteristics. The mountains are: the Investment Mountain, the Real Estate Mountain and the Marketing Mountain.

From this mountain range of Money Mountains, there are at least 9 separate and distinct streams of income flowing into your growing reservoir of wealth. Each stream was carefully chosen using a formula I use call the Money Tree Formula. In this book, I will teach you the 9 characteristics of the ideal stream of income. Then, I will teach you exactly how to profit from each of these streams. The goal is for you to add at least one new stream of income to your life each year. Eventually, these streams will overflow your life with prosperity and freedom.

The first question people usually ask at this point is, "Why Multiple Streams?"

The Wisdom of Multiple Streams of income.

How many streams of income did it take in the 1950’s for a family to survive? One. Today, very few families can survive on less than two streams of income. And that won’t be enough in the future. It’s a volatile future. You’d be wise to have multiple streams of income flowing into your life.

Prosperous people have always known this. If one stream dries up, they have many more to support them. Ordinary people are much more vulnerable. If they lose one of their streams, it wipes them out. And it takes them years to recover.

In the future, people will need a portfolio of income streams — not one or two — but many streams from completely different and diversified sources. So that if one streams goes, you barely feel the bump. You’re stable. You have time to adjust. You’re safe.

Do you have multiple streams of income flowing into your life at this time? Maybe it’s time to add another one.

So let’s assume that you’ve decided to add another stream of income to your life. You could always get another part time job, but that’s not the kind of income I’m talking about. You certainly don’t want to get stuck on somebody else’s treadmill. You want the kind of streams that you can own.

I’m talking about residual income. That’s a fancy term for a "recurring" stream of income that continues to flow whether you’re there or not. I’ve heard too many small business owners say, "I haven’t taken a vacation in 5 years." There’s something wrong with that picture. I don’t have anything against hard work. But after a few short years of hard work, you should be free to have your streams of income forwarded to your mailbox in Tahiti. Get the picture?

Not all streams of income are created equal. Some streams are linear, and some are residual. Here’s the question that tells you whether your income streams are linear or residual:

If you answered, "only once," then your income is linear. Income streams from a salary are linear. You only get paid once for your effort. And when you don’t show up for work, neither does your paycheck.

With residual income you work hard once, and it unleashes a steady flow of income for months or even years. You get paid over and over again for the same effort. Wouldn’t it be nice to be compensated hundreds of times for every hour you work?

For example, as I mentioned earlier, I published a book in 1980 called Nothing Down: How to Buy Real Estate with Little or No Money Down . I put in over 1,000 hours of hard work writing Nothing Down before I earned a single penny. Teenagers working at McDonald’s earned more than me. But, I wasn’t looking for a salary. I wanted a royalty. So I was willing to sacrifice. It took over two years before the money started to flow. But it was worth the wait. I’ve now earned millions of dollars in royalties. And every six months I still get nice royalty checks. That’s the power of residual income…it keeps flowing and flowing and flowing.

Here’s another example. Have you seen that tiny battery tester on the Duracell battery? I’m told that the inventor presented his idea to the big battery companies. Most turned him down, but Duracell saw the genius of it and agreed to pay just a few pennies per battery pack for his idea. And now he makes millions, because those residual pennies add up. In essence, he invested many hours of his time to create the concept, to package it and then to sell it. And now it generates a raging river of residual riches to him and his family. And the best part about it – HE DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THERE! It flows without him.

Linear vs. Residual. Do you see the difference?

The secret of the wealthy is not that they have more money but that they have more TIME freedom. Because many of their streams are residual, they have time to spend on anything they want.

When you view people’s lives through the filter of residual income, many groups of people aren’t as wealthy as they appear. Doctors and dentists don’t earn residual income from their labors. Their income potential is capped. They can only see a fixed number of patients in a day. And they have to be there for every single one of them. That’s linear.

The same holds true for top sales people, chiropractors and attorneys. Most of them don’t enjoy the power of residual income either. They may appear to be rich but they’re on a treadmill just like the rest of us.

What percentage of your income is residual? If you’re smart you’ll start shifting your income streams from linear to residual. This will give you the time freedom to do what you want when you want. And that starts with turning on at least one new residual stream this year.

Do you know who Warren Buffet is? He’s the smartest stock picker in history and the wealthiest investor in the world with a net worth in the tens of billions. What if Warren Buffet himself were to call you on the phone and give you a hot stock tip. He tells you to sink every penny into a certain stock. He says that he’s invested a couple of hundred million of his own money and he feels the stock is a sure bet to double or triple in value. What would you say to him? "Sorry Warren but I like to pick my own stocks by throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal!" Would you listen to the master or continue to do things your own way?

Well, I’m no Warren Buffet, but through my books and seminars I’ve probably helped to create more millionaires than he has. If I were to guess, it’s probably in the thousands of millionaires. And this book contains all of my "hot streams" for the new millennium.

It’s where I’ve sunk a huge amount of my own time and effort. What I am about to share with you are the best opportunities I’ve seen in 20 years. They are certain to create many residual millionaires in the next 10 years. You could be one of them.

The Money Tree Formula

The first step to picking the right income streams is to pass them through the filter of the Money Tree Formula — the 9 essential characteristics of the ideal income stream

Having a money trees assumes that you have an exhaustible, effortlessly generating, stream of cash flow which doesn’t require your presence. In order to do this, you must be in a position to create, control and own that stream of income. Another way of saying the same thing, is you must become an entrepreneur…a business person. You may still retain your employee position, but on the side, as a way of protecting your long term financial future, you need to create additional streams of income. ASAP

I remember watching TV recently as a couple was being interviewed about being laid off from a long term job position. The wife looked into the screen and said, with tears in her eyes, "For 17 years we worked hard for our security, and now we’re out in the cold. It’s not fair." I wanted to reach through the television set and tell her, that for 17 years she had the illusion of security. She wasn’t secure, she just thought she was. Working for someone else, unless you own a piece of the profits, is not security. It’s just the illusion of security.

The Money Tree formula

If you’re going to become a home based entrepreneur, you’d better learn which businesses have the potential for creating lifetime streams of income and which ones are just a dead end way to make a few extra bucks before they peter out and die. I’d like to teach you a formula for the perfect business in the next century. I call it the Money Tree formula and it will be very easy for you to remember because it spells the word MONEY TREE…

Multiple Streams of Income

The first goal in starting your own home based business is to add another stream of income to your life as a safety net for when other of your streams of income dry up. But the home based business you select should be a source of more than just one stream of income. It should eventually be a source of multiple streams of income all by itself.

For example, suppose you’re considering buying an existing restaurant. What possibility will you have to grow? Can you add more shops? Is your idea franchisable? Can one of your food entree’s be sold nationwide as a frozen item? Can you license your special cooking secrets to other restaurants. Is there a cookbook in there somewhere? What about bottling and selling your special sauces? Get the drift? Don’t even consider a business that doesn’t have expansion potential for additional streams of income. That’s why the first M in the formula reminds you of Multiple Streams of Income.

Outstanding product or service

If your product, service or information isn’t distinguishably excellent it will eventually become a casualty of competition. The goal of creating a money tree is to do the work once and to have the money flow for the rest of your life. What good does it do to create a business and eventually have it succumb to competition. In order for your source of income to survive through the next ten recessions…as there will be many more recessions in your lifetime…you must select a product, service or source of information that has the possibility to be permanently and perpetually profitable. When times get tough, people gravitate either to price or to quality. Don’t get stuck in the middle. That’s a sure formula for disaster. And don’t compete with the rest of the world on price. Make sure the quality of your produce is outstanding…the best in the world at a fair price. And you have a good chance of succeeding long term.

Nothing Down

Why nothing down? Well, it doesn’t have to be completely zero down…but as little of your own money as possible. If you’re like most people, you probably don’t have a couple of hundred grand lying around to invest in your business. But what if you do have a nice chunk of cash. Should you run out and find a business to match your money and launch in? I think that one of the greatest curses is to have a lot of money to put into a new business.

Suppose you want to buy a hot franchise. It might cost you $100,000 and that’s just for the franchise rights. Then, you need to purchase inventory, leasehold improvements, special equipment. And what do you get? For most franchises, you get the right to be tied to a business 12 hours a day, to manage a lot of undereducated, under motivated employees, and make a steady paycheck for yourself. In a sense, you are just buying yourself a job. Why spend tens of thousands of dollars of your own money just to buy yourself a job…with a lot of risk?

I’m going to show you businesses that you can launch with little risk, little or no money down and the possibility of creating what I call "walk away" cash flow –money that flows to you whether or not you show up.

Employee-resistant

That’s right…you don’t want employees. Employees are dangerous! They begin to feel they are entitled to their jobs. ("You can’t fire me. I own this job." ) The rapid increase in employee/employer litigation should be enough to convince you that you want to find a home based business that can be done by yourself, with a very low employee to income ratio.

I used to be the president of a seminar company with over two hundred employees. I made the decision to downsize when one of the employees sued me for age discrimination. He was in his late sixties when he came to work for us and when we layed him off during an economic downturn, he slapped us with a $500,000 lawsuit. We settled out of court for $2,000 but that was the last straw. I decided to never again put myself in a position where one disgruntled employee and his smart attorney could take it all away.

Today, I have zero employees. I make as much today as I used to make with 200 times less hassle. I like it that way. All of my streams of income can be monitored from a telephone anywhere in the world on only a few hours a day.

A friend of mine, Dan Kennedy puts it this way, "When it comes to employees, hire slow and fire fast." Most business people do just the opposite. They hire fast and fire slow. I say, try to find money tree businesses that don’t require any employees and then you don’t have to worry about either hiring or firing.

Yield

The streams you choose should be high yielding, high profit cash cows. Five years ago a friend of mine, Collette, started such a home based business. In less than a year she was making about $10,000 per month. What’s more, this business was a money tree business. It generates cash flow even if she stops working! But why stop when she is having so much fun? Today, after five years, she has grown her business till she now earns over $500,000 a year net, net, net.

What’s the yield on that kind of income? It’s the equivalent of having TEN MILLION DOLLARS in the bank earning only 5% interest! That’s my idea of yield. In this book I’ll be sharing exactly how Collette did this…as well as other business that meet the same kinds of money tree characteristics.

Trend and Timing

Starting a business against the trend is like swimming up stream against the current. . Running a business is hard enough without trying to swim upstream. But when you choose a business that is with the trend it’s like floating downstream with the current. How do you select a business that’s on trend?

The first time I started a business was just after college. I started buying real estate…and as luck would have it…it was the exact right time. The baby boomers wanted real estate and the demand drove prices upward. Anyone who owned property made a killing. You could almost do no wrong.

Then, I started teaching people how to buy real estate with little or no money down. My little classified ads brought hoards of calls. It was a feeding frenzy. I was on trend. My seminar businesses took in more than a hundred million dollars in the next decade.

The secret is to get in front of a trend and ride the wave. The biggest wave of our century is the Baby Boom – 76 million people. This generation is four times the size of the previous generation. As this mass of humanity rolls forward through time it creates a huge demand wave. Picking businesses which are at the leading edge of this age wave has created thousands of fortunes. You need to make sure that your new business is leading this trend and not following it. It can make a huge difference in your lifestyle.

Residual Income

We’ve already talked about the importance of this part of the Money Tree formula.

But to emphasize this concept even further, let’s compare it to an escalator. Have you ever walked up a down escalator…the wrong way? When you walk up the down escalator, you have to walk fast just to stay in the same place. And to get to the top, you have to walk at double speed. People on the Up escalator don’t have to work hard at all. They just stand there holding the hand rail and the escalator takes them to the top.

These two escalators represent the two kinds of income that you can earn…linear income and residual income. Our economy is a down escalator. You work hard for your money but with inflation you have earn 3-5% more next year just to stay in the same place. But this puts you in higher tax brackets. The more you make the more they take. It seems you work harder and harder without making any progress. Your bank account balance earns 2% and your credit card balance costs you 20%. You’re going in the hole 24 hours a day. You wonder why you can never catch up. And if you stop…the escalator just takes you right back down to the bottom.

That’s what it’s like to earn linear income. When I think of this kind of income I think of how they catch monkeys in Africa. A native takes a coconut and cuts off one end to make a small hole just the size to allow a monkeys fist to enter. To the other end of the coconut they attach a long cord. They place a few peanuts inside the coconut, place the coconut in the middle of a clearing and hide behind a tree to wait for the monkeys to come. The monkeys come and smell the peanuts inside the coconut shell. One monkey reaches inside the shell to grab the peanuts, but with the peanuts inside, his fist is too large to escape the hole in the coconut. And then the native yanks on the cord and hauls that silly monkey to captivity because the monkey will not let go of those peanuts to save his skin.

Are you working for peanuts?

If you’re walking up the down escalator, you are caught in a Monkey Trap. What you want is Up Escalator Income. Which escalator are you on?

Here’s a list of the many types of residual income that you want to be exploring:

Savers earn interest

Song writers earn royalties on their songs.

Authors, like myself earn royalties from their books and tapes.

Insurance agents get residual business

Securities agents get residual sales.

Network marketers get residual commissions

Actors get a piece of the action

Entrepreneurs get business profits.

Franchisors get franchising fees

Investors get dividends, interest and appreciation.

Visual artists get royalties from their creations

Software creators get royalties.

Game designers get royalties.

Inventors get royalties.

Partners can get profits.

Mailing list owners get rental fees

Real estate owners can get cash flow profits

Retired persons can get pensions

Celebrity endorsers get gross percentage profits

Marketing consultants get % of profit or gross revenue

When you go to bed tonight, ask yourself this question, "What percentage of my day did I spend creating residual income?" If the answer is zero, you’re in trouble. You’d better wake up tomorrow and get busy. More on residual income later. I hope now you see why it’s such a vital part of our money tree formula

Essential

Whatever you sell, try to pick something that’s essential or is perceived as essential by a large and very motivated segment of society. Let me give you the real reason that real estate has always been a great wealth creation vehicle and a prime source of residual income for hundreds of thousands. It fits the Money Tree formula. Check it out for yourself and you’ll see why..

Whatever product you choose to market just make sure it’s essential. The more people need it and the more often they need it, the more successful your business can become.

The final E in the Money Tree formula stands for Enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm

You’ve got to love what you do. If you hate what you sell, you’ll never be any good at it. The prime admonition from Gary Halbert one of the all time great marketing gurus is this; SELL WHAT YOU LOVE. Truth is, you’ll never be truly great unless you do.

Well, there you have the 9 major characteristics of the Money Tree formula. These 9 characteristics are essential to the kind of hands off, hassle free businesses that create lifelong streams of cash flow.

In this book, we’ll be exploring in depth the 9 practical business which fit this formula perfectly.

As a final note.

In the book, Multiple Streams of Income, I start with the basics, and help the reader build a strong foundation for wealth. Then, I expand into the nitty gritty strategies and techniques for developing 9 separate streams of income. Finally, I finish with strategies and techniques for protecting these burgeoning streams of income.

Like Nothing Down and Creating Wealth, I believe that Multiple Streams of Income will become a long term, perennial bestseller. I’m anxious to bring it to the large and growing audience which is desperate for these solutions.