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I am a millionaire, but I don’t feel like one. Perhaps the better way of saying it is it does not feel like I thought it would. Let’s get back to that a little later. First a bit in regards to me and the family. I am a forty-one year old white male. Married for 12 years with two kids- a nine year old girl and a seven year old boy. I have an undergrad degree in finance and went to night school to get an MBA. I have expended my entire career working in selective information engineering (IT). Most of that time has been programming. I have a few stints in management, but it didn’t take. My wife works at home and has done so since our daughter was born. She volunteers at the kid’s school rather a bit. I also keep her busy with a lot of the business activity. Our kids attend public school. We were going the private school route for a few years. When both were going to be all-day students, the bill was $18,500 for the year. By the time they are be in 2nd and 4th grade, the bill will be $21,000 and that was if tuition stayed the same. Fat prospect on that. I have started my own company. The dream was to have a huge operation where I would have 50+ persons working for me and spend my time running the business and helping fetch in new clients. Four years into it, we are considered successful, but the big dreams have turned out to be little dreams. I have a few people working for me but the majority of revenue is still billing my own hours. I come from a middle class home. My father worked for the federal government and never made more than $25,000 a year. I went to public schools. I am smart and my grades always reflected that. I graduated high school in the top 10% (barely). My father passed away when I was in high school. While there was life insurance, it was not much. My mom had to go back to work after staying home to raise the kids for 20 years My career and savings started when I was 22 and graduated from college. 18 years later I may see assorted things:
Some Good Decisions Student Loans – I never had any. My undergrad was salaried for by scholarships and out of pocket. My employer remunerated for the MBA. I did not go to a big school, even though I could have. The decision to go where I did, McNeese State University in Lake Charles, LA, was made out of finances. They offered a scholarship that covered tuition, books and a room. I was on my own for food. A little help from mom and a lot of percentage time work took care of that. I noticed that numerous of my friends upon graduation were paying off student loans. Every month they were paying a couple of hundred dollars. For them this went on for years. I was saving my cash instead. This provided a good foundation for later. Avoiding bad debt - I may do not forget one day talking to a friend who was with regards to to get married. He had $8,000 in student loans, $10,000 in car debt, $3,000 in credit card debt and was regarding to get a loan to pay for his percentage of his $30,000 wedding. He never told me precisely what he wound up paying for the wedding but I bet his part was half. Here is a guy who is 25 years old and $36,000 in debt and all he has to show for it is a car and a marriage certificate. He was going to be paying that off until he is in his thirties and then begin saving. I had a ten year head begin for savings on him. While I have had car notes, they were never huge and never more than three years. I put as huge a down payment as I could. I have purchased more employed cars than new cars. I remunerate off the credit card each month. I do charge everything I can. This maximizes the points. The bill has often been higher than what I want it to be. My wife and I have had more than our part of fights when I opened the credit card statement. In the end I made sure the remainder never got up and we never remunerated interest or fines. I lately had a speech with a co-worker who told me she had $75,000 in credit card debt. This fascinated me because we had similar jobs with similar recompense and are similar ages. How may I have so much and her so little? Her answer was it started little when she was in her 20′s. She and her husband would carry a remainder this month and go on vacation rather of paying for it. That remainder never got paid. The next month they had an $800 car repair, adding to the balance. They had a cycle of accumulating bad debt for 15 years that resulted in $75,000 of debt. Ground rules with the spouse – Before we got engaged, I wanted to go over finances with my then-girlfriend. I encountered she had $2,800 in credit card debt. I let it be known that we were not going to get engaged until she got it off the credit cards. She employed for and received a debt consolidation loan at a much more reasonable rate. This started the groundwork very early for us with regards to what would be good and bad financial decisions. My wife is not a cash person. She is a spender and consumer. She momentum buys steadily while I seldom do. My saving has ofttimes been countered by her spending. I could have been a millionaire a great deal of years ago if she viewed cash like I do. The things we do for love. While we have fought, and will fight again, over cash and spending, there have always been galore ground rules. No credit card debt, do not touch the savings unless for another investment, save each month, try to keep out of the way of spending on the huge things. We have taken trips, purchased clothes, had nice meals and remodeled kitchens. We temper these things. I try to delay these disbursements and question if we actually need all of it. One thing that works for us was we devised a distinguished checking account for her. Every month we transposed cash into that account. Birthday gifts, baby gifts, wedding showers, clothes and her pocket cash all came from there. These were the items that would get out of hand. More than once she was giving a wedding or baby shower with other people. It always seemed that one of the others would go out and spend an outrageous amount. The $400 dollar cake was my favorite. They would through the receipts in a pile, add them up and divide. Three showers in a month totaling $450 may bite you quickly. When these types of expense would come from our savings, she treated it like there was a bottomless well. When she had to recompense from her own account, she started budgeting. The account in a literal sense saved our marriage. Buy a house early – I purchased my primary house when I was 25. I remunerated $52,000 for it. It is a 2 bedroom /1 bath with 1100 square feet. I lived in it for 5 years. Four years being single and one after we got married. I still own that house today. It has been a rental property the rest of the time. By the time we moved out, I could rent it to cover the note and then some. As time went by and property values rose so did rents. This house is now paid off and is valued at $210,000. I gather $850 a month in rent. I could get a little more but we have a good tenant who compensate on time and doesn’t call much. That single decision is now responsible for almost 15% of my net worth and provides around $6000 a year positive cash flow (minus taxes and insurance). Maximize 401K – We have put as much in to our 401Ks as we can. These accounts are now worth over $200,000 and the returns have just been average. I have changed jobs various times. Several of these 401Ks are now in IRAs. This cash is taxed-deferred, inspires savings and adds up over time. Save each month – Shortly after college I opened a mutual fund account. I started putting $100 a month into it. After a while I upped it to $110. I got another fund and started adding $50 a month into it. Over the course of time, those regularly every month investments became $800 a month. But over the course of time, these mutual funds are now worth $180,000. Look into making cash outside of your job – There are lots of ways to make cash on the side. We have gotten in and out of direct-marketing companies. We have purchased and sold on Ebay. I have been to dozens of foreclosure auctions. These are only a few of the items I have looked into. I have invested hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars over the course of time. Multiple times I had to make the decision that this was not worth my time or any more of my cash and had to cut my losses. In the end I have found side incomes that fetch in an extra $30-$40K a year. There are a ton of get-rich-quick ideas out there. Many of the things you will come all over are scams. Some only work for sure types of people, commonly not the type of person I am. What I presently do, I stumbled into. I stumbled into it because I was looking into something else that did not work. Every chance you see, book you read, seminar you attend will spurn a heap of other thought and idea. The challenge oftentimes becomes assessing what is the best match for your skill, capital and time. Hobbies – I recognise guys who play golf each weekend. Others go hunting or fishing. While we all need our hobbies, ofttimes these hobbies dominate our lives and finances. Golf is not cheap. Even the most inexpensive green fees may run up the hundreds of dollars a month for the avid player. Add in balls and clubs and it may genuinely get up there. If you are making $70K a year and have two kids and spending $300 a month on golf, it is time for a financial re-evaluation. If golf is more necessary than wealth keep it up, but you are not going to make it to the millionaire club that way. Let’s not just pick on the golfers. Hunters, boaters and shoppers have equivalent if not more outflow. I see hunting leases for $2000 a year. $500 pair of shoes. $17000 boats. If you want to save, you ultimately need to determine – hobbies or wealth? I started my own business - I could have without apparent effort just worked for someone else or gotten a occupation in a big IT shop somewhere. Instead I put myself out there to receive contract gigs. There were times where it was just me. Luck plagues the diligent. I sought out chances where I could fetch in other people. Since I was incorporated, I could do that. I knew a bunch of programmers and could get them better rates that anyplace else. I kept thin margins, but making $4K a year off of someone is better than making nothing. Starting your own business enables multiple prospects outside of the evident earnings centers. There are so a good deal of expenditures that I used to absorb that I could now deduct from my taxes. Office supplies, mileage driving to client, etc. Work Hard – whether I was working for myself or an individual else, I was always a hard worker. I came in a little earlier and stayed a little later. I did not whine if I had to come in on the weekend. I accepted obligation and sought allies. I took the blame and shared the credit. I became valuable wherever I was. This set me up for higher pay when I worked for someone. When I went out on my own guess who the introductory clients were – people who used to work with me. They knew they would get a sure level of productivity out of me. Things I wish I did Increase the regularly every month investment – There were long periods of time (5-6 years) where I left the on a monthly basis investment in the mutual funds alone when my income went up. I will have to have increased the per month payment into them each time my recompense went up. Buy and move into more houses – I look at the house I purchased when I was 25 that is now worth $210K and regret not repeating the process. My wife and I could have moved 2 – 3 times more and purchased a house each time. This would have left us with a more prominent trail of rental properties all well on their way to being paid off. The single best beginners way to build a real estate empire is to buy a house, live in it, buy another, move into that and rent out the former. Fixed rate loans for the proprietor of the house is still the most inexpensive way to get a loan. It likewise fends off the extra loan costs of buying investment property. Things I cannot control Luck – This goes both ways. The house I purchased when I was 25 was in an area that has not suffered from urban decay. I can not predict how a neighborhood will get that disease. It could have just as without apparent effort turned out to be a bad neighborhood. Fortune smiled there. Just like that was good, I may account for $250,000 I have invested back into my business that I have not received a return on. I have hired assorted sales humans who did not work out. Each one of them drew a salary, submitted expenses, hired outside aid and took humans away from billable attempts all to aid close a sale. While these are things you do to grow a business, you want to them to genuinely grow the business. My business has grown more from my attempts than any individual I paid to do it. Was it my bad judgment in assessing their sales natural abilities and qualities or I did not give them the help they needed? I can not rule it out. Were they not putting their all into it? I can not rule that out either. When they were hired, everyone thought it was a good idea, the approach was sound and we communicated regularly. I just never got the result I wanted. It was a good decision that had a bad result. The Dot Bomb era – I had a lot of technology stocks. There was a point in time where my and my wife’s IRA was worth $160K. This was in early 1998. A year later they were worth $60K. There is a reason I principally invest in S&P 500 index funds today. I used to consider myself a “very aggressive” investor. Not any more. Losing $100K in the market will do that to you. What it is like to be a millionaire Having over a million dollars in net worth is a good place to be. It sounds oversimplified but being a millionaire is better than not being one. It is not the penultimate financial goal that I once thought it was. I am not retiring and picking up golf any time soon. I still worry regarding cash flow. So much is tied up in real estate, mutual funds and the business that I can not get to a lot it without tax consequences. I still drive an eleven year old car. We eat at the same places. We still argue regarding the credit card statement. I still buy the generic pasta at the grocery store because it is 15 cents cheaper. I am not going to “summer” in Europe or buy a Mercedes. That is not how I got here. If I make those types of lifestyle changes, I might not stay here. I have splurged on a few things. I have “invested” in my baseball memorabilia collection and we took a nice vacation. I do sleep better knowing I have a good deal of flexibleness and pluses working for me. There are people I work with that have a couple of thousand in the bank, even more in credit card debt and live from check to check. I have over $1.4 million in assets. This includes everything. If I get 5% return on them, that is another $70K added onto the amount in the next year. The same persons I just references are years away from saving $70K much less $70K in a single year. That is what a lot of people make in a year. That is my return when I do nothing. It was not positive linear growth each month. Many months went backwards or stagnant. Remember, I saw my market values drop $100K. There was over $250K invested back into the business. To save a million dollars you to need to be out there and take a chance. Not all of them are going to work. Hopefully a lesson learned pay dividends down the road. Having the cash allows me to look at dissimilar investments. Doors that were shut are now open. I just have to be smart. I may consider dissimilar options. In the end that is what I am genuinely after – the choices to control what I want to do and on my terms.
The MH230R radio features flexible charging choices for uttermost mobility. Users may choose to charge in the included dual drop-in charger, or use the mini-USB port in the radio to charge in the car or connect to a PC. For remote adventures frequent alkaline batteries may be applied when no power is available. Additionally, hands-free communication is available by using the iVOX speech-activated feature, which provides active families the freedom of mobility in even the most remote settings. MH230R FeaturesKeypad Lock Channel Scan Charging Options 121 Privacy Codes
Ten Call Tones Hands-Free Communication QT (Quiet Talk) Noise Filtering Talk Confirmation (Roger Beep) Alert Weather Receiver Weather Alerts What’s in the Box Most helpful customer reviews 415 of 419 people found the following review helpful. Since I want this review to be helpful to people people wanting to buy these, I want to make something clear. The range claim that any 2-way radio manufacturer makes, is base on optimum conditions with no structural or atmospheric interference. In real life you can never expect to get those kinds of ranges out of any unit. Due to the curvature of the earth I would not expect that any radio could reach farther then 10 miles under normal conditions unless each radio is located in an elevated position with a valley in between, such as on either side of the Grand Canyon. So when you buy a 2-way radio, don’t pay much attention to the range claims that are made. Just make sure that they will do what you need them to and don’t expect a miracle that deifies the laws of physics. PROS: CONS: THE BOTTOM LINE: 157 of 159 people found the following review helpful. The reception is fine, although you do notice the clearer sound and slightly longer range of the MR355s (I’m talking only a couple hundred yards longer). The unit uses the supplied NiMH battery pack or 3 AAA’s. Of course, AA’s batteries like the ones used in the MR355 would have more power and last longer, but then, the MR355 has more features (like vibrate and an LED flashlight) that use up more power. Anyway, I knew the compromises when I got the units. However, I wasn’t ready for the MH230 to show 2 bars on the battery icon and yet the display wasn’t functioning clearly. Some of the LCD lines were very faint or could only be seen at an extreme angle. For instance, the 8 looked like a 9 bcs the left lower LCD bar wouldn’t light up. After trying out the features, I fully charged the battery. Wouldn’t you know it, at full charge, all the LCD’s work. At partial charge (or discharge, as you like it) some of the LCD bars would fade out. This happened with all 4 MH230 radios and didn’t happen with any of the MR355s, even as the more expensive radio’s would run out of juice. NOTE to Giant Electronics, fix this issue! You’re ruining Motorola’s rep. Anyway, we use the MH230 in thick steel crane and payloader cabins, talking to people in the office 700 yards away with a couple 30 foot tall cargo ships and a few dozen welders doing their thing in between. The sound is mostly clear and everyone gets heard. The users wish they had the PTT earbuds that come with the more expensive units, but hey, you get the bright yellow ones, be happy! The guys who crawl around inside the steel hulls get the MR355s with the PTT, vibra and lights. They’re happy too. 4 stars for the unit performance, minus 1 star bcs of the LCD problems at half batt. Can’t complain I’m not getting the 23 mile range, or they would owe me stars. BTW, many 25 Watt vehicle or base station radios with 36 inch antennas won’t get 23 miles, so don’t expect these reach that far. 81 of 82 people found the following review helpful. |
Great 2-way radios!
A good budget buy, but you’re better off spending the extra $20 for the MR355s.
very satisfied
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