Starting a investing plan doesn’t take a lot (business coaching)

September 28th, 2008 admin Posted in business |

By auctionsdir

One of the main reasons that people put off saving and investing is that they don’t think they have the money to do it. However, starting a savings plan doesn’t take a lot of money or financial knowledge. With a few easy steps, you can start investing for your future today.

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Step #1: Write down your goals.

If you are thinking about how nice it would to be rich, that’s nice. It may have gotten you to thinking about investing, but you will need something more to keep you on the path to success. You need goals.

A goal is what will keep you motivated. Sit down and identify your goals. You may only have two main goals: send your children to college and retire comfortable. These are the best goals you can have. But go ahead and throw a goal in that is purely selfish. You may want to go to Europe one day. Perhaps you want to buy a boat or a cabin in the mountains. Whatever your goal is, write it down. This is essential in savings. You have to know what you are saving for.

Don’t just write your goals down, work on making them come true. Look at your goals often. Put them on your computer, tape them to the refrigerator, put a post it in your wallet. Remember that every dollar you spend is taking you away from your goal. Every dollar you save puts you closer.

Step #2: Find the money to invest.

This seems to be the most difficult step for most people. That is because they just look at it and give up. You don’t need a lot of money to start investing, so don’t give up just yet. All you need is a few dollars a week to start. Look at your monthly budget. Where can you cut back a few dollars in order to invest. You’ll be surprised at how quickly a little bit of money can add up over time.

If you save $25 a month for 30 years, and earn a 8% annual return on your investment, you will have $29,346.47. Not enough to retire on, but certainly enough to go to Europe. If you can invest $25 dollars a week for 30 years, you end up with $127,953.53. The more you save and invest, the more interest you will earn. Think about it, by just giving up your morning coffee on the way to work and investing the money you are able to build a sizable investment.

Run an online investment calculator to see just how much you could save by simply cutting back on your spending. Investing doesn’t take a lot of money. You can invest a small amount and give it time to grow. Actually, you are better off investing a little at a time than letting it build up in your savings account for ten years and then investing it.

If you find that it is difficult for you to save, you need to pay yourself first. Set up an automatic withdrawal each month from your checking account to your investing account. This means that you pay your savings just as you would a bill. No more excuses. You can’t put it off just one more month.

Step #3: Manage your investments wisely.

I know that it is every person’s dream to make a fortune on the stock market. However, the greedy often fall hard. You have to manage your investments wisely in order to meet your goals. Investing for the long term is a wise way to mitigate the risk that is associated with the stock market. Over time, the stock market goes up and down. However, history shows us that it usually goes up a little higher than it goes down. In thirty years, you could see as much as a 10% return on your investments.

But that doesn’t mean that you invest and forget. You have to review your investments periodically to make sure that they are performing to your standards. What are your standards? That depends on your risk level and goals. Take the time to educate yourself on the proper way to manage your long term investments. Just a week or so of reading can give you the knowledge necessary to make your financial goals a reality.

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To Start a Successful Consulting Firm, Learn from Your Clients
By Donald Mitchell

I want to be part of the best team in the world.

–Will Carling

Let me tell you how I started a successful consulting firm so that you can learn from my experience . . . and get better results than I did.

After three years at head of corporate planning and development at Heublein, I was tired of the 100 mile commute each way. Contacting my old clients, I was pleased to find that they were all interested in having me work for them at night and on the weekends.

With Heublein’s permission, I started offering consulting again. Soon, I had a big enough base of business to start consulting full time, as the head of Mitchell and Company.

A month after I did that, Carol Bruckner Coles who had also been a colleague at The Boston Consulting Group, resigned from Heublein to join me. Carol did more of the missionary marketing than I did because there were more prospects near her home in Connecticut than near mine in Boston.

Early on, she realized that selling to a lot of people at one time was a better idea than selling to people one-by-one. We launched a series of free seminars in New York, and companies were soon fascinated by our ideas about how corporate performance translated into stock-price improvement, something we had done a lot of work on at Heublein.

That interest surprised us because much of our strategic work was of more economic value. This stock-price improvement practice became the backbone of our firm over time. From this enthusiasm for stock-price improvement, I learned that there was untapped potential in areas that I didn’t even consider to be very important because others did.

Wanting to push the boundaries of knowledge, Mitchell and Company did pioneering research in many areas of stock-price improvement. Typically, however, we found that client interest in important new ideas and practices was tepid, at best.

Focusing on that lesson, we turned our research model around and began to only research questions that were of interest to clients. In the process we formed a learning organization for executives at major companies, Share Price Growth 100.

Over the course of a decade, we learned that every major existing approach to stock-price improvement other than the one we had been developing was fatally flawed. Why? It turned out that those who wrote the road maps for stock-price improvement hadn’t bothered to do much, if any, research to test the validity of the directions.

Following Peter Drucker’s advice, we began inventing lots of new measurements, employing those measurements in as many ways as we could, cross-checking our conclusions with independent sources of measurements, and adjusting our conclusions to reflect how well the past estimations had worked. One of our first new measurements was to express a company’s stock price in terms of the factors that the company’s shareholders paid the most attention to.

We did this by looking at statistical correlations to a company’s historic stock price. Next we interviewed shareholders to find out which of those most highly correlated factors (or similar ones) the investors actually used to make buy and sell decisions.

The result was a verified multivariate correlation (an equation describing past stock prices in terms of what investors considered) that reflected those shareholder perceptions and practices. Those verified correlations, in turn, were helpful for anticipating stock-price changes through locating what had happened to companies taking new actions whose shareholders had similar perceptions and practices.

In addition, we used anonymously sponsored interviews to test market planned or potential actions to see which steps would elicit the most stock purchasing with the least selling.

We had a big surprise at first: We greatly underestimated how well our advice worked. We weren’t optimistic enough!

Here’s an example. One of our clients had asked us about taking a subsidiary partially public. After they succeeded with that stock offering, the parent company’s stock went to almost double the level we had predicted.

From that observation, we eventually learned that the client had created a bandwagon effect that caused investors to rush forward to create stock-price growth faster than would otherwise have occurred for less well designed and communicated programs. To adjust for that bandwagon factor, we added a fourth set of measurements related to the improved ways of understanding the current and potential liquidity of the stock.

Eventually, we developed a service to facilitate creating and sustaining the bandwagon effect and incorporated that learning into our estimations. With that service, we could help companies attract investors who would raise the value of the company while avoiding those who would harm the company’s stock price.

Then, the great epiphany occurred for me: With the right direction, people could greatly exceed the highest levels of historical stock-price performance that anyone had achieved. Now that was interesting to think about! Many company leaders were intrigued, too, and identifying and executing strategies to exceed historical stock-price performance became a rewarding part of our company’s strategy consulting practice.

Oh, how I wish I had been a faster learner from my clients in those days. I hope you will learn from my experience.

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Donald Mitchell is an author of seven books including Adventures of an Optimist, The 2,000 Percent Squared Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, and The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. Read about creating breakthroughs through and receive tips by e-mail through registering for free at

http://www.fastforward400.com .

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