“In the years leading up to mid-2007 keen observers noted dangerous leverage in the US debt markets and some predicted that the bubble would pop. Predictions like this were contrarian while the market was rising, and they were ridiculed. But then when the bubble did pop, those same contrarians became nearly household names as network TV invited them on to explain their predictions.”

So begins a lengthy and informative article by blogger FOFOA, in which he claims that the coming devaluation of the dollar will be sprung on us without warning. If you have time, I recommend you read it (here is the link)

Your editor is in partial agreement with FOFOA. Indeed, I would say the devaluation of the dollar is already well underway. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are currently living in a world of illusion… just this week, against all odds, the stock market rose again. When people see a rise in the nominal value of their investments, they believe they are making money. But they are wrong. Few take in that the cost of living is rising disproportionately higher… so they are actually losing. This is the fundamental strategy behind what I call the stealth devaluation of the dollar. The purchasing power of the dollar has fallen drastically since the Second World War, with a notable increase in the velocity of the fall in the last couple of years.

Another informed and respected commentator on the collapse of the dollar is John Rubino, who recently interviewed yours truly for an article on offshore banking and asset protection. In recent comments he refers to some news passed on by veteran newsletter writers Harry Schultz and Bob Chapman, that verges on what I would call a conspiracy theory…. or does it? You decide! The story goes like this:

“Some US embassies worldwide are being advised to purchase massive amounts of local currencies; enough to last them a year. Some embassies are being sent enormous amounts of US cash to purchase currencies from those govts, quietly. But not £’s. Inside the State Dept there is a sense of sadness & foreboding that ‘something’ is about to happen, unknown re a date-just that within 180 days, but could be 120-150 days.”

Bob quotes another source that “Panasonic has told their people to be back in Japan by Sept 09.”

Harry Schultz’s remarkable take on the situation:

“My HSL suspicion is that the elite plan another FDR style “bank holiday” of indefinite length, perhaps very soon, to let the insiders sort-out the bank mess which is getting more out of their control every day. Insiders want/need to impose new bank rules. Widespread nationalization could result, already under way. It could also lead to a formal US$ devaluation, as FDR did by revaluing gold (& then confiscating it). But devalue against what? The euro? Doubtful. Gold? Maybe. Or vs. the IMF basket of currencies (which seems more likely)-& much in the news recently.

Any kind of bank holiday will push the US$ lower, which may be a bonus benefit to their ongoing scenario of letting the $ fall. Such a fall would get the devaluation they want without having to declare it. In sum, the insiders want more bank & system control, fewer banks & a lower US$. A bank holiday would suit all their needs.”

So there is the question. Can we expect a sudden dollar devaluation, complete with suspension of markets and a so-called ‘bank holiday’? Or will we see the stealth devaluation of the dollar continue to accelerate?

My bet is on the latter. Why would politicians and those in power risk the wrath of the people by devaluing the dollar so explicitly from one day to the next, when they have successfully got away so long with devaluing the dollar on the quiet with few people noticing. But of course I may be wrong, and the situation may be even more out of control than I think.

Either way, I’m not sitting waiting for it to happen, and you shouldn’t either! If you are properly prepared, such a collapse would be a huge profit opportunity. But you would not be able to rely on usual market mechanisms… we have to consider that the stock markets and financial system might be completely suspended. It happened in the aftermath of 9/11, but it hasn’t yet happened during this global financial crisis. Never say never!

My advice is that markets are a nice convenient way of speculating play money for short term gains, but every serious investor needs to keep wealth outside the financial system too. That may be in your own business (if it is resilient) or it may be in real estate (people will always need places to live) or it may be by stashing gold bullion in an offshore safe deposit box.

The Q Wealth Report is here to advise you on all these options and more. If you haven’t yet read our free five-day e-mail course The Secrets of the Super Rich, I would urge you to sign up for it now. As I said, it is absolutely free and without obligation. I think you will find it an eye-opener!

by Peter Macfarlane, Offshore Banking Expert at The Q Wealth Report

Do you know how anyone, regardless of credit history, can borrow money offshore at only 1% interest (or even less) with no scheduled repayment date, then simultaneously reinvest it for a much higher return elsewhere?

Of course not – because the rock-solid European banks routinely making such loans are not allowed to advertise these deals in your country. Your government calls this “investor protection.” Here at The Q Wealth Report, we call it “protecting the cosy domestic banking cartel.”

Foreign currency aribitrage is one of the areas where you can make money even in a falling market. Currencies will always go up and down, and there will always be big differentials in interest rates. Trading “pips” in the forex market, where you can make or break your account in a matter of minutes, is not every investor’s idea of fun. Slower moving and less risky (though of course not risk free), the types of foreign currency arbitrage programs we are writing about here offer an attractive alternative for more conservative investors.

The arbitrage or investment loan is a fairly standard wealth creation offering from European private banks, albeit little known. The gearing of the initial deposit, together with the currency arbitrage, makes it possible to invest a larger amount in a currency with high interest rates, thereby increasing the prospects of high returns.

Typically you will have to invest about USD/EUR 250,000 in a private offshore bank to get that facility. This can then be leveraged from one to five times, depending on the risk level of the currency you are buying into. If the initial deposit is USD 250,000, a loan of up to USD 1,000,000 can be contracted and then a proportion of that can be invested in a high income Bank CD in a currency paying a much higher interest rate.

The loan will typically be taken in a low interest currency s0 at the moment, USD, EUR and GBP would be perfect… although traditionally most loans have been taken in Swiss Francs or Japanese Yen. To spread risk, you can also choose to take the loan in a combination of two or more currencies. Then, you take the loan proceeds to buy another currency, paying a higher yield in CDs – typically in a multi-currency account at the same bank.

A variation on the same theme, of course, would be investing in gold. You can certainly borrow money against CDs or electronic gold to invest in other products offered by your private bank. Whether they would allow you to borrow against physical gold? I doubt it, unfortunately. In this case you might just be better off buying Perth Mint Certificates and asking your friendly offshore banker for a loan secured by that. Alternatively, hedge your investments by borrowing against US dollar investments, in US dollars, but using the loan proceeds to buy gold. That way you get the best of both worlds.

(Note – I normally recommend only physical gold – see my article How to Buy and Hide Gold Bullion Offshore. But, if someone is lending me money at 1% interest in fiat currency, and I can buy gold with it, I might not be so fussy…)

The profit factors, to summarize, are as follows:

• Exchange rate factor: Raising a loan in one currency and investing in another can lead to exchange rate gains as wells as losses.
• Interest rate factor: Where investments are made in bank CDs, the interest rate level of the currency of CDs can affect the return on the investment.
• Gearing factor: The return on investments is improved by the gearing of the initial deposit. The gearing factor plays an important role again if there is a loss. (You lose more!)

Of course, like any investment, you should do your due diligence very carefully. The good thing is that this, when done correctly (read those last three words again!) this makes a standard, conservative bank deposit that much more exciting. In these times of low interest rates on major currencies, we could certainly all use a little more excitement like that, couldn’t we?

How do you go about getting an Invest-Loan? Not, as you’ve probably guessed, from your local high street bank. If your existing banker won’t lend you money for things like this, it’s time to think about moving your investments to a different bank. A good place to start with the Practical Offshore Banking Guide 2009, available free for download to our members. I’m happy to make personal referrals to private banks who will carry out Invest-Loan transactions, at no extra charge to all Q Wealth members as part of the free consultation that members are entitled to. Just contact me via the Q Wealth London offices. If you’re not yet a member, you can join now to gain immediate access to these privileges.

As with any generation, our kids are our hope for the future. But having just posted over on my private offshore banking blog some more doom and gloom about the wild machinations in the commodities markets and the likelihood of a default on US Treasury bills, I thought I might cheer up Q Wealth blog readers with something more positive!

Our kids might be getting bored with watching TV. That’s good news. I just received the first issue of a thought provoking new newsletter from Vera Verba called Individual Virtue, which describes itself as “The Journal of Courage, Honesty, Self-Respect & Achievement.”

According to Individual Virtue, an intellectual called Clay Shirky has come up with a new theory: Cognitive Surplus. Cognitive means related to thinking; surplus means extra. Get to the point, you are saying. Well, here’s the idea…

Following the Second World War, America had something truly new – millions of people with free time on their hands. In other words, masses of people with idling brains: A cognitive surplus.

So, what did people do with all of this new free time? They watched TV… for many hours, nearly every day of their lives. Collectively, Americans watch 200 billion hours of television per year.

But this, reports Clay, is beginning to change. There are a number of reasons to think that he may be right, but Individual Virtue gives you his example:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know, and I can vouch for this based on my own kids: Media that’s targeted at you, but doesn’t include you, may not be worth sitting still for.

If Clay is right, and if people do finally pull themselves away from their flashing images, the consequences could be staggering. Those 200 billion hours of TV watching are equal to the creation of 2,000 Wikipedias, every year. Think about that for a moment.  This cognitive surplus is huge, even if only one quarter of us cut back on our TV-watching and do something half productive.

How will this little girl spend her time as she grows up? What if she spends half of her cognitive surplus doing something productive with that mouse, rather than sitting like a zombie in front of a TV? And what if her peers do the same? There are going to be some big changes happening. Very positive changes.

Doing something is almost always better than doing nothing. On the other hand, if you do nothing, you are – and remain – a zero, a non-event.

Looking to the future, what results can we expect from this cognitrive surplus? How can you as an individual harness this power, either for investment purposes or in your life? These are the kinds of questions we answer in each quarterly issue of The Q Wealth Report. If you are wary of signing up for a product you are not familiar with, please note that we now have a “try before you buy” promotion where you can instantly download a free sample back issue of The Q Wealth Report. Simply enter your email address in the box in the sidebar now and benefit also from a free subscription to Q Bytes, the best of Q Wealth in your inbox!

We’ve all seen people who are just naturally lucky.

They’re the ones who manage to sail through life with more unexplainable “lucky breaks” and fewer disappointments than most people get. Success just seems to come easier for them.

Where most folks have to struggle just to get ahead, lucky people regularly have opportunities just plop down in their laps. Of course, they work hard, but that doesn’t fully explain the special treatment that life seems to reserve for them.

It almost appears that they were born with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouths. Or born under a luckier star than most mere mortals.

Well, cheer up; neither stars nor spoons are at work here. All they have is seven simple secrets.

These secrets are easy little things that you can begin applying in your own life. And when you do, things will start to change for you. Your career will begin to blossom in unexpected ways. And one day you’ll realize that now everyone has started calling you naturally lucky, too.

Ready to command more luck in your life? Here are the seven simple secrets of naturally lucky people.

Secret #1. Lucky people don’t believe in luck.

I recently interviewed ten unusually successful business people for a book I was writing about the role luck plays in the lives of successes.

Nearly every one of them stated plainly they don’t believe in luck.

In the next breath, however, they told about unending streams of “serendipitous” or “synchronistic” events that routinely happen in their daily lives.

I believe they don’t like the word “luck” because it implies there’s no way to control it. They’ve learned that there is.

If you prefer to call it serendipity   rather than lucky, that’s okay. The message here is not which term to use. It’s about what you can do to get these kinds of things happening for you. When they do happen, you can call them anything you want.

I’ve chosen to use the word “luck” because when I say it, people have a fair idea of what I mean.

I try to avoid radical new terms when we’ve already got a perfectly good word.

If someone walked up to you and said, “I help people learn to cause pleasant improbabilities to occur more frequently,” you’d probably look around for the exit.

On the other hand, when I use the word “luck,” you and I are in the same ball park, concept-wise.

It’s okay if our definitions differ slightly. This happens to us all the time anyway. Ever seen a husband and a wife agree on what “shopping” means? Or “one hour”?

Most of the time, even though there are differences, we’re close enough for useful communication.

And that’s what we’re doing here.

Secret #2. “Bad” stuff happens to them too.

There are several ways to have good luck.

The most common (and the most useful) is to find opportunities in problems.

A friend of mine says: “There’s always a miracle in a mess.” Or, “Find A Need & Fill IT!”

Let’s say you and I are neighbors, and our whole city has a common problem. Maybe it’s infestation with insects. Or it could be a serious pollution problem from a nearby plant.

While almost everyone is griping and complaining about the problem, you might decide: “Hey, if I can solve this problem, it will help my neighbors, and it can also make a profit for me.”

Your neighbors only saw the problem, but you looked deeper and found an opportunity.

All great fortunes have been built upon solving great problems. From the huge railroad empires of the 19th century, to the communications networks of the 20th, and now the software giants of the 21st, they have all solved problems for people.

Was Andrew Carnegie “lucky” that he foresaw a huge need for steel in the 1800s? Some say he was.

But I say he simply knew how to recognize a widespread need and turn it into a giant opportunity.

The same is true of Bill Gates. Many people criticize Gates for his business practices, but whatever else you believe (either way) about the man, you have to admit, he saw an opportunity before most others did, and he acted.

That’s probably the most common and the most controllable way to generate your own luck.

Secret #3. More people quit than lose.

If you knew ahead of time without a doubt that your success was guaranteed, how much would you go out and do?

Would it make any difference in the kind of things you would attempt? How much higher would you direct your aim?

Well, a funny thing happened to me a few years back. I was sitting and feeling sorry for myself one day because of all the failures that I had been through.

Then it suddenly occurred to me that one particular case hadn’t been a real failure. I admitted to myself (reluctantly) that I had simply quit too soon. I had quit before I’d really had a chance to fail.

Then I thought of another non-failure.

Then another.

And before long, I was buried under an avalanche of similar cases. In fact, I couldn’t think of a single time when I had actually kept on trying long enough to fail. In other words, I had never experienced failure in my entire lifetime.

Only quitting.

A realization like that will realign your reality.

After that, it’s hard to consider yourself a failure because you’ve never failed. Who knows what you might really be, down inside?

I began to wonder: what would have happened if I had stuck with even a few of those situations just a little longer? What if I hadn’t been quite so ready to quit? More to the point, what about today and tomorrow? What if I stopped being so ready to throw in the towel and surrender too soon? Would I start seeing the number of clear successes in my life begin to grow?

The more I played with that idea, the better it sounded.

I’d like to report to you that my life instantly and dramatically changed that day, but it didn’t.

Oh, it did BEGIN changing, but it wasn’t the dramatic turnabout that you read of in books or see in movies.

Instead, each time I’d find myself in a discouraging situation, I’d start thinking of all those times I had just simply quit trying too soon. And gradually, over time, I began developing a new mental toughness that didn’t take temporary setbacks quite so seriously.

I started finding a new resourcefulness within myself. My “keeping-on” average began to go up, and my “failure” average started declining.

I count that one realization among the most important in my life. Not because it solved a problem, but because it identified one.

Once I could see that the problem wasn’t even what I thought it was, I was then able to work on doing something else instead.

And you know what? My luck began improving.

Secret #4. Betting on losing hands makes losers.

Successful poker players don’t play every hand they’re dealt.

If you keep count, the hands they fold far outnumber the hands they hold.

That’s because a good card player knows the odds for every possible card combination. They know whether a flush beats a full house and which is more likely to occur.

And they only bet their money on likelihoods.

They love to play with amateurs because amateurs play for “the juice,” the emotional charge they get from throwing money out on the table, whether they win or lose.

Good players don’t bet on risk, they bet on probability.

Lucky people are very similar. They know longshots when they see them, and they may bet, but it’s a calculated bet.

Lucky people are some of the most tenacious people on earth when it’s appropriate.

But they’re also some of the quickest quitters when the odds don’t favor them. In fact, they’ll usually opt out of most situations before they even begin because they have learned to recognize and rank opportunities.

What makes a good opportunity? First, does it solve a WIDESPREAD problem? Second, do the people with the problem have enough money to pay for solving that problem? Third, is it easy to reach the people with the problem? Fourth, is your solution a really good one?

If they don’t find all four factors, a lucky person will walk away because they know it’s a losing hand, no matter how much they personally love the idea.

So if a lucky person sees he’s holding a losing hand, he quits quickly and cuts his losses.

In other words, don’t spin your wheels on deals or projects not   likely to work out.

Secret #5. Most good luck comes through other people.

Good luck almost never happens in a vacuum.

Several years back I read a book by Max Gunther titled “The Luck Factor.”

Most of the details in that book have dimmed, but I’ve never forgotten the core idea:

Most lucky breaks are brought to you by other people.

Few people find significant amounts of money on the street or buried in the backyard.

Perhaps even fewer win lotteries.

Instead, luck comes more often in the form of opportunities.

You’re with a group of ladies (or guys) who are sitting around complaining about how it’s hard to find respectable men (women) to date. Everybody is really getting into the problem.

The person next to you leans over and whispers, “Don’t you wish everyone would just quit whining?”

But instead of complaining about all those complaints, a little lightbulb clicks on in your head.

You realize a good computerized screening service for romantic introductions would fill a real need .

You don’t say anything, but weeks later, when you announce the new service, and you’re flooded with calls from singles all over the city wanting safer introductions, all your friends whisper, “She’s so lucky. Where did she get that great idea?”

You know where the idea came from, but you’re not telling.

A great deal of “good luck” is   created by relieving   discomfort or solving the problems  of  someone else. In other words, you solve a problem for yourself and then “sell” the solution to others. Once I couldn’t find a  laundry in the town where I lived. So I bought a coin-op washing machine, advertised, and my customers paid for it  in a month.  I did the same thing   renting rooms to students.

Secret #6. Good luck favors those who have prepared.

Let’s say you’re appearing in an amateur play in a little theater in your neighborhood.

A big-name producer from Hollywood is visiting a sick relative, hears about the play, and for a bit of distraction decides to attend.

She sees a spark   in your performance, asks to meet you, and offers you a screen test.

Okay, freeze the frame for a second.

Are you prepared for this big break?

Have you done all the study and the practice and the foundation work it takes to be a professional?

Will you have the technique and the skills necessary to do the job?

Or are you going to try and fake your way through it?

If you’re prepared, you’re likely to do well. This means a giant step toward your dreams.

And if you’re not prepared… well, good luck with your day job.

Secret #7. You can attract good things, too.

All this talk about finding opportunities in “bad” events and developing your skills is important, but there’s a more sunny side to luck as well.

Internet entrepreneur  & motivator Joe Vitale terms it his “Magic Escalator through Life,” and award-winning author John Harricharan has titled it “The Power Pause.”

I interviewed both of these men recently, as well as eight other fascinating people, about how they manage to stay so consistently successful.

Every single one of them has techniques for keeping their mind tuned to the things they want. And they attend to this “mind tuning” every day. They’re not casual about this. Oh no, they put regular effort into it. Their successes and their luck are not accidents.

If you’re tempted to greet this with a dismissive, “Oh yeah, I’ve read those positive thinking books, and they did nothing for me …” then you need to think again.

Yanik Silver, an up-and-coming star on the Internet tells how he starts every single morning with a 15-minute session in which he goes over his “values and goals.”

Every morning – no exceptions. Without a goal you are just drifting aimlessly.

How to attract  “Your Perfect Customers.”

In every case, the “lucky winners”  start by thinking–looking for opportunities [products & services] in every situation.  What they put into their mind has a direct one-to-one relationship to what appears and happens in their life. Look for opportunities and they will materialize. You will create them. Nothing happens till YOU make the move.

Taking responsibility for the bad stuff in your life.

If you’ve got uncomfortable situations right now, you’ll never have the power to change them until you accept the fact that you created that mess… exactly as it is — right now.

Admit to yourself that you created your own problems, down to the last tiny detail, and only then will you take command of the power to change those problems.

Fortunately, it’s not as impossible as it sounds at first.

Your mind is like a bucket. If the bucket is filled with muddy water, all you have to do is start a steady flow of clear, fresh water into the bucket.

Soon, the bucket (or your mind) is filled with clear, fresh contents.

Steady daily input of clear, fresh thoughts will change the things that appear in your life, without the need for major renovation. It just happens. You work on the inside, and the outside takes care of itself.

This means you don’t fight the old thoughts. You just give them minimum energy. You don’t resist, you don’t struggle. Instead, you put your attention as much as possible on the positive, good things you want to appear in your life. Get rid of the negative things and losers that drag you down.

The lucky things and opportunities  you spend your time thinking about just start happening for you. One day you wake up and realize, “Hey, I’m a pretty lucky person now. When did that happen?”

Does this mean you won’t  have to make  hard decisions, or deal with any stress-causing people?

No, but you’ll find yourself handling difficult decisions and those fussy people more easily because you’ll have a clearer vision of what lies on the other side, after you’ve gotten past them. They just won’t loom so large in your path any more.

So these are the seven secrets that naturally lucky people use to keep their life moving forward:

1-They don’t believe in (or wait around for) random luck. They take charge of generating their own luck.

2-They look for the opportunities that are always embedded in life’s inconveniences.

3-They don’t quit when they’re holding a potentially winning hand.

4-They drop a losing hand as quickly as possible. And they know the difference.

5-They polish their people skills constantly because almost all opportunities are brought to us by others.

6-They develop a wide range of professional and social skills so they’re prepared for any opportunity to knock.

7-They fill their mind with “goals,”  thoughts of what they want, because they know they will get what they fill their mind with– whatever that is.

Other than these seven simple things, however, naturally lucky people don’t do anything special at all.

Author: Charles Burke, edited by Grandpa- Nov. 2008 Grandpa is author of Bye Bye Big Brother, the abridged editon of which is published by Vera Verba. Q Wealth Report subscribers may download a sample of Bye Bye Big Brother in the members area.

“Gold, you and your cohorts have been accused of misleading investors into thinking that you would help them preserve their wealth, when exactly the opposite has been true of late. How do you plead?”

That’s the subject of a fascinating new debate article by David Galland that we’ve just added to our ‘Free Articles‘ section. David brings some new insight in an easy-to-read manner and includes some useful charts to back up the arguments. You can read Trial of Gold

Just today we’ve seen the dollar dipping once again into its downward spiral. Don’t be misled by short term booms! And as further evidence that the government’s conspiracy to control money is breaking, sovereign countries are beginning to reject the so-called anti money laundering controls that the US is seeking to impose on the rest of the world.

A lucky few will be joining us in Panama just after the US elections for our next Recipes for Success workshop event. If you can’t join us in Panama but our interested in Q Wealth’s practical solutions not just to protect your assets but to see them grow during the coming crash… then you can sign up right here and now for a no-risk trial subscription to Q Wealth Report!

By Bill Conde for The Q Wealth Report
Conventional wisdom has it that if you want to become very wealthy (in monetary terms) you need to save money and not buy things that will decline in value, like cars and consumer goods, on credit. I agree. But here is one technique I learned from my father that has helped me many times to get those consumer goods I wanted – quickly and without building up debt.

Most people will wander around shops looking at things, starting with the base of what their budget is. I work the other way around. I start out deciding what I want, then I figure out the budget I need and how to get it. (I even do this with real estate, which drives realtors crazy because I will never tell them the price range I am looking at.)

Anyway, this technique is deceptively simple. Go out to the shops, decide on the high ticket item you want to buy, and preferably place an order for it. I once read in a book that successful people always treat themselves to just a little more than they can really afford, and that stuck with me as a form of mental justification because I do enjoy my little luxuries. Buy quality, not the cheapest product. Over the long term you will come out ahead by buying quality goods.

Once you’ve placed the order, the store will give you a delivery date. Then you go and figure out how you are going to pay for it.

Sounds crazy? You bet. It takes a lot of discipline and a good dose of self-confidence.

But I’ve done this many times for something I really want. And always, somehow, I managed to make the deadline. Sometimes it means cutting back on something else that is non essential. But often I find some deal reaches fruition that pays for it. Usually it’s not just one deal, but a combination of little things that come together so I don’t end up in the bind of losing my deposit or being unable to pay for my purchase. In the worst case you can usually talk people in to waiting a few extra days, but you don’t want to.

You would be amazed that this technique works, because on the surface it sounds crazy. But analyzing it carefully, it is just a form of goal setting. How many times have you read that it’s important to set specific goals and deadlines? And how many times have you not done so, and then complained that you can’t afford things you want?

Having something you really want already on order, and a fixed deadline by which you have to pay for it, is about as specific as you can get. It really focuses the mind. On the other hand, the potential downside is minimal. You literally have nothing to lose and everything to gain!

Try it – it will work for you!

Are you sitting, waiting for the “right” opportunity to come along? Follow this advice.

By Dr Richard Cawte

There are plenty of opportunities out there.  The deal of a decade doesn’t happen once every ten years, it happens as often as you want it to.  Life is not about opportunity, it’s about choices: the choices you make each and every day.  Are you choosing to welcome new opportunities or have you already decided that things never go your way, that someone else is always the lucky one?

One thing is for sure: if you are in a permanent state of high stress, worrying about money, fretting over how you’re going to pay the bills, you will find it harder to bring the wealth that you want into your life.  It’s a simple rule: it doesn’t matter how many ships there are out at sea or how full of goodies they are, none of them can get into the harbour if there’s a storm raging.  Your ships come in over a calm sea.

We all have plenty of ships out there in the seas of opportunity, but often we are so anxious, so worried, that we create too much turbulence for them to get to the dock.  To become a magnet that attracts what you want in life, you need to say farewell to worry and stress.  After all, when did you last see a worried magnet?

If you walk away from something out of fear, you take it with you.  One of the things I help my mentoring clients do is to face up to their fears, but not in a way that is uncomfortable.  I don’t believe that we have to “move out of our comfort zone” in order to achieve success.

Stay in your comfort zone!

In fact, I help people do the opposite: move right into your comfort zone, because by doing that, you find you’re doing what comes naturally, and you find that you’ve walked up to your fears in the process, and that the monsters you created in your mind are really just poodles you can handle easily!

Do it with a smile.

When you’re in your comfort zone, it’s easy to smile.

To me, that’s what life’s about.  If you ask me how I measure wealth, I’d say that you can measure it in how many times you smile each day.

It makes good business sense too.  There’s a great Chinese proverb (I love those old proverbs!) that says: “A man who cannot smile must not open a shop” and that’s absolutely right.  When you’re doing something that makes you feel good about yourself you are more likely to smile, and that is attractive to other people.

For some reason people seem to think we have to be serious to show we’re working hard.  When the boss comes in to the office, everyone stops messing around and joking and pretends to be very serious.  It’s one of the things we all have to unlearn, because you can bet your bottom dollar that when you’re doing something that makes you smile, you’ll spend more time doing it, and you’ll be successful as a result.

So, it really does pay to be light-hearted! Or, to put it another way,  Wealth Mastery is Being Well.
Note: The above entry is a brief extract from an article entitled Being Wealth = Well Being by Dr Richard Cawte which appears in issue 51 of The Q Wealth Report, available to subscribers at the beginning of September 2008. Log in here. If you would like to find out more about Dr Richard Cawte, visit his website www.richardcawte.com

Dr Richard Cawte will also be speaking on Wealth Psychology and Well-Being at Recipes for Success – Q Wealth’s event in Panama City, Panama this November. For further details you can visit www.qwealthevents.com

By Bill Conde for The Q Wealth Report

In my last blog entry I wrote about some of the cliches we have all heard, which taught us to be poor from a young age. Now here’s the cliche of cliches:

“Money doesn’t buy you happiness.”

A friend of mine says, “Yeah, but I’d rather cry in the back of a Rolls Royce than the back of a mini!”

Then there’s all the guff about materialism and spiritualism being opposed, which is nonsense. Being wealthy does not make you a charlatan just as being poor does not make you spiritual.

This one often comes down to a religious edict of some kind. Religion is the other great stifler of financial success (unless you happen to be part of the religion’s administration, in which case it is just fine for you to accept as much money as possible!). Perhaps the best known challenge to wealth from the Bible is

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the gates of heaven”.

No kidding! Gee, shucks I better stay poor then, otherwise we’re doomed to a life of roasting on eternal barbeques.

Yet I ask you this: who can give more to charities, local schools, any good cause? Is it the poor who are too terrified of making money, or the rich, who can donate in large amounts? Who has done more to help the poor, you or Bill Gates?

You see how serious that gets? How deeply entrenched are the mechanisms whereby we spurn or reject opportunities that could bring us untold riches?

Then there is the classic:

“The love of money is the root of all evil”,

which normally gets shortened to “Money is the root of all evil”. So, the mind is thinking, “Yuk, if I get rich, I’m going to be evil.” Not only that, but if I make lots of money, I’ll be one of the

“Stinking Rich, the Filthy Rich”

That money stuff sure is bad news. Makes me filthy, stinking, dirty. Don’t want that.

So people stay poor. Supposedly safe inside the cosy hologram that is their day to day job, until the economy collapses, or they get made redundant, or they die.

What about:

“Never a borrower or a lender be!”

Shucks, that cuts out buying a house, or an apartment, or even a hotel, or how about a chain of hotels – if you’re thinking of taking out a dreaded mortgage! Forget the leverage such an investment tactic gives you. No, no, stay inside, watch a reality show and don’t take any risks!!

OK, that’s enough ranting from me. But I hope you see where I’m coming from. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why all these blocks have been put in place. Rulers do not really want all their subjects to become financially independent. When that happens, there is a potential threat to the ruler (whether that is a king, a pope, a priest, a government or a military junta).

Governments worldwide cottoned on to what religions had been doing for centuries: teach the people to be poor, and give the rulers all their wealth! Simple, but very effective.

Now of course, information can travel around the world with the click of a mouse, so things are opening up for everybody. People are challenging preconceptions they have long held to be “truths”. This is great, because the big myth spouted by government and the media is that there is a finite amount of wealth, that we cannot all be rich at the same time (materially rich that it). This is just as stupid as saying the earth is flat. But then, remember what happened to Galileo when he suggested otherwise!

Poverty consciousness is the phrase used by many wealth-gurus to encapsulate the state of mind people are educated into by parents, teachers and media. I prefer the term “keeping us in the matrix.”

In fact, I would go further than that, for what happens is that people lose any sense of their own power, their innate value, their ability to achieve success overnight – and we all have these things. Poverty consciousness is actually denial of self. It is “unreality dependence”, a state where the individual has accepted the mainstream views and will fight to support them even to his or her own expense.

Changing our own reality is the key to changing our wealth, whether material, spiritual or physical.

It is as easy as waking up in the morning and saying “I am rich”.

Note: The Q Wealth Report is offering blog readers a free 12-part course on Offshore Wealth Creation. Easy, bite-size instalments will be delivered to your inbox every few days. To learn more, click here.

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How School and Family Keep Us “In the Matrix”: Part 1

By Bill Conde for The Q Wealth Report

As I approach my fortieth birthday, having never had a job – at least, not a nine to five – I thought it would be interesting to take a look at some of the ways in which people are kept “inside the matrix”.

It starts when we are very young. Do you remember the early days of your childhood, when you were happy to take on anything… when you loved life just for the moment? When you weren’t afraid of bills, tax men, mortgages and so on?

At five or six years old, we were all happy to volunteer answers – even if we didn’t know them! We were happy to get on a bike, give it a go, fall over, then get back on again. Yet by the time most people are 15 – 20 years old, enthusiasm has waned, fears have set in, and risk aversion becomes the norm.

How does this affect wealth creation?

Here are some of the ways we are subtly taught to be poor.

How many of you are familiar with any of the following terms:

“Money doesn’t grow on trees!”

“We can’t afford it”

“Money doesn’t buy you happiness.”

“You have to work hard to be rich”

“They don’t deserve that”.

Do any of those strike a chord with you? You may well have made your own way in the world, and there is a chance you may have had enlightened teachers or parents who did not say things like that, but my guess is that the vast majority of us nod our heads when we hear these phrases, and say “yes, I remember Mum and Dad, or Uncle Jimmy saying that to me”.

Fast forward to the present day. How about this one:

“That’s way too risky.”

This is usually a comment about investing of some kind, when the alternative is saving. The wealthy invest all the time and keep generating more. The poor and middle class save money and never have any spare.

At school we’re taught that the best thing to do is to learn all the nonsense they throw at us, so that we can go out there and get a good job. A safe job. A secure job. But in the world of electronic communication and the Internet, this truly has to be the worst advice. Why get a job, when companies come and go, people make fortunes and lose them and make them again, almost in the blink of an eye?

There is certainly nothing safe about a normal job if all you have to fall back on is the state/government pension. Who knows what is going to happen to government coffers when the baby boomers all reach retirement age? If governments turn round and say “Err, sorry we can’t afford it”, what do those people do? They’ll be wishing they had “taken risks” investing instead of backing the government donkey.

Note: The Q Wealth Report is offering blog readers a free 12-part course on Offshore Wealth Creation. Easy, bite-size instalments will be delivered to your inbox every few days. To learn more, click here.

How School and Family Keep Us “In the Matrix”: Part 2

By Bill Conde for The Q Wealth Report

In my last blog entry I wrote about some of the cliches we have all heard, which taught us to be poor from a young age. Now here’s the cliche of cliches:

“Money doesn’t buy you happiness.”

A friend of mine says, “Yeah, but I’d rather cry in the back of a Rolls Royce than the back of a mini!”

Then there’s all the guff about materialism and spiritualism being opposed, which is nonsense. Being wealthy does not make you a charlatan just as being poor does not make you spiritual.

This one often comes down to a religious edict of some kind. Religion is the other great stifler of financial success (unless you happen to be part of the religion’s administration, in which case it is just fine for you to accept as much money as possible!). Perhaps the best known challenge to wealth from the Bible is

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the gates of heaven”.

No kidding! Gee, shucks I better stay poor then, otherwise we’re doomed to a life of roasting on eternal barbeques.

Yet I ask you this: who can give more to charities, local schools, any good cause? Is it the poor who are too terrified of making money, or the rich, who can donate in large amounts? Who has done more to help the poor, you or Bill Gates?

You see how serious that gets? How deeply entrenched are the mechanisms whereby we spurn or reject opportunities that could bring us untold riches?

Then there is the classic:

“The love of money is the root of all evil”,

which normally gets shortened to “Money is the root of all evil”. So, the mind is thinking, “Yuk, if I get rich, I’m going to be evil.” Not only that, but if I make lots of money, I’ll be one of the

“Stinking Rich, the Filthy Rich”

That money stuff sure is bad news. Makes me filthy, stinking, dirty. Don’t want that.

So people stay poor. Supposedly safe inside the cosy hologram that is their day to day job, until the economy collapses, or they get made redundant, or they die.

What about:

“Never a borrower or a lender be!”

Shucks, that cuts out buying a house, or an apartment, or even a hotel, or how about a chain of hotels – if you’re thinking of taking out a dreaded mortgage! Forget the leverage such an investment tactic gives you. No, no, stay inside, watch a reality show and don’t take any risks!!

OK, that’s enough ranting from me. But I hope you see where I’m coming from. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why all these blocks have been put in place. Rulers do not really want all their subjects to become financially independent. When that happens, there is a potential threat to the ruler (whether that is a king, a pope, a priest, a government or a military junta).

Governments worldwide cottoned on to what religions had been doing for centuries: teach the people to be poor, and give the rulers all their wealth! Simple, but very effective.

Now of course, information can travel around the world with the click of a mouse, so things are opening up for everybody. People are challenging preconceptions they have long held to be “truths”. This is great, because the big myth spouted by government and the media is that there is a finite amount of wealth, that we cannot all be rich at the same time (materially rich that it). This is just as stupid as saying the earth is flat. But then, remember what happened to Galileo when he suggested otherwise!

Poverty consciousness is the phrase used by many wealth-gurus to encapsulate the state of mind people are educated into by parents, teachers and media. I prefer the term “keeping us in the matrix.”

In fact, I would go further than that, for what happens is that people lose any sense of their own power, their innate value, their ability to achieve success overnight – and we all have these things. Poverty consciousness is actually denial of self. It is “unreality dependence”, a state where the individual has accepted the mainstream views and will fight to support them even to his or her own expense.

Changing our own reality is the key to changing our wealth, whether material, spiritual or physical.

It is as easy as waking up in the morning and saying “I am rich”.

Note: The Q Wealth Report is offering blog readers a free 12-part course on Offshore Wealth Creation. Easy, bite-size instalments will be delivered to your inbox every few days. To learn more, click here.

How School and Family Keep Us “In the Matrix”: Part 1

By Bill Conde for The Q Wealth Report

As I approach my fortieth birthday, having never had a job – at least, not a nine to five – I thought it would be interesting to take a look at some of the ways in which people are kept “inside the matrix”.

It starts when we are very young. Do you remember the early days of your childhood, when you were happy to take on anything… when you loved life just for the moment? When you weren’t afraid of bills, tax men, mortgages and so on?

At five or six years old, we were all happy to volunteer answers – even if we didn’t know them! We were happy to get on a bike, give it a go, fall over, then get back on again. Yet by the time most people are 15 – 20 years old, enthusiasm has waned, fears have set in, and risk aversion becomes the norm.

How does this affect wealth creation?

Here are some of the ways we are subtly taught to be poor.

How many of you are familiar with any of the following terms:

“Money doesn’t grow on trees!”

“We can’t afford it”

“Money doesn’t buy you happiness.”

“You have to work hard to be rich”

“They don’t deserve that”.

Do any of those strike a chord with you? You may well have made your own way in the world, and there is a chance you may have had enlightened teachers or parents who did not say things like that, but my guess is that the vast majority of us nod our heads when we hear these phrases, and say “yes, I remember Mum and Dad, or Uncle Jimmy saying that to me”.

Fast forward to the present day. How about this one:

“That’s way too risky.”

This is usually a comment about investing of some kind, when the alternative is saving. The wealthy invest all the time and keep generating more. The poor and middle class save money and never have any spare.

At school we’re taught that the best thing to do is to learn all the nonsense they throw at us, so that we can go out there and get a good job. A safe job. A secure job. But in the world of electronic communication and the Internet, this truly has to be the worst advice. Why get a job, when companies come and go, people make fortunes and lose them and make them again, almost in the blink of an eye?

There is certainly nothing safe about a normal job if all you have to fall back on is the state/government pension. Who knows what is going to happen to government coffers when the baby boomers all reach retirement age? If governments turn round and say “Err, sorry we can’t afford it”, what do those people do? They’ll be wishing they had “taken risks” investing instead of backing the government donkey.

Note: The Q Wealth Report is offering blog readers a free 12-part course on Offshore Wealth Creation. Easy, bite-size instalments will be delivered to your inbox every few days. To learn more, click here.

How School and Family Keep Us “In the Matrix”: Part 2

By Bill Conde for The Q Wealth Report

In my last blog entry I wrote about some of the cliches we have all heard, which taught us to be poor from a young age. Now here’s the cliche of cliches:

“Money doesn’t buy you happiness.”

A friend of mine says, “Yeah, but I’d rather cry in the back of a Rolls Royce than the back of a mini!”

Then there’s all the guff about materialism and spiritualism being opposed, which is nonsense. Being wealthy does not make you a charlatan just as being poor does not make you spiritual.

This one often comes down to a religious edict of some kind. Religion is the other great stifler of financial success (unless you happen to be part of the religion’s administration, in which case it is just fine for you to accept as much money as possible!). Perhaps the best known challenge to wealth from the Bible is

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the gates of heaven”.

No kidding! Gee, shucks I better stay poor then, otherwise we’re doomed to a life of roasting on eternal barbeques.

Yet I ask you this: who can give more to charities, local schools, any good cause? Is it the poor who are too terrified of making money, or the rich, who can donate in large amounts? Who has done more to help the poor, you or Bill Gates?

You see how serious that gets? How deeply entrenched are the mechanisms whereby we spurn or reject opportunities that could bring us untold riches?

Then there is the classic:

“The love of money is the root of all evil”,

which normally gets shortened to “Money is the root of all evil”. So, the mind is thinking, “Yuk, if I get rich, I’m going to be evil.” Not only that, but if I make lots of money, I’ll be one of the

“Stinking Rich, the Filthy Rich”

That money stuff sure is bad news. Makes me filthy, stinking, dirty. Don’t want that.

So people stay poor. Supposedly safe inside the cosy hologram that is their day to day job, until the economy collapses, or they get made redundant, or they die.

What about:

“Never a borrower or a lender be!”

Shucks, that cuts out buying a house, or an apartment, or even a hotel, or how about a chain of hotels – if you’re thinking of taking out a dreaded mortgage! Forget the leverage such an investment tactic gives you. No, no, stay inside, watch a reality show and don’t take any risks!!

OK, that’s enough ranting from me. But I hope you see where I’m coming from. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why all these blocks have been put in place. Rulers do not really want all their subjects to become financially independent. When that happens, there is a potential threat to the ruler (whether that is a king, a pope, a priest, a government or a military junta).

Governments worldwide cottoned on to what religions had been doing for centuries: teach the people to be poor, and give the rulers all their wealth! Simple, but very effective.

Now of course, information can travel around the world with the click of a mouse, so things are opening up for everybody. People are challenging preconceptions they have long held to be “truths”. This is great, because the big myth spouted by government and the media is that there is a finite amount of wealth, that we cannot all be rich at the same time (materially rich that it). This is just as stupid as saying the earth is flat. But then, remember what happened to Galileo when he suggested otherwise!

Poverty consciousness is the phrase used by many wealth-gurus to encapsulate the state of mind people are educated into by parents, teachers and media. I prefer the term “keeping us in the matrix.”

In fact, I would go further than that, for what happens is that people lose any sense of their own power, their innate value, their ability to achieve success overnight – and we all have these things. Poverty consciousness is actually denial of self. It is “unreality dependence”, a state where the individual has accepted the mainstream views and will fight to support them even to his or her own expense.

Changing our own reality is the key to changing our wealth, whether material, spiritual or physical.

It is as easy as waking up in the morning and saying “I am rich”.

Note: The Q Wealth Report is offering blog readers a free 12-part course on Offshore Wealth Creation. Easy, bite-size instalments will be delivered to your inbox every few days. To learn more, click here.

By Peter Macfarlane for The Q Wealth Report

Need an offshore company with bank account fast? Then you’d better contact me this week, because next week I’m going on a month-long vacation to enjoy the European summer.

Are you surprised? Jealous? You may be. You might be thinking “Peter must be doing very nicely, thank you” or even “Peter doesn’t care about his clients.” But I am confident my holidays will pay for themselves many times over, and that the quality of my service to my clients will improve once I return, refreshed.

If you want to become wealthier and freer, you should seriously consider taking this kind of vacation too. Here’s why.

If you’re anything like me, you are addicted to the internet. I get hundreds of emails per day and process most of them myself. The daily influx grows all the time. This year, I’ve added RSS feeds from many news sources and blogs that I need to follow for my writing, which has generated hundreds if not thousands more headlines to read – every day!

Most of us now have mobile devices, that are not just phones but also give us email, news, and so on wherever we happen to be.

Here’s the secret. Once you realize that you can turn off the noise for a few weeks without the world coming to an end, you will find yourself liberated in a way that few people will ever know.

As a writer and businessman, having some time to get on with new projects undisturbed is of great value. But even if you’re not a writer, all of us need free time to contemplate without distractions. To spend time with family. To make plans for the future. To take a step back and see how far we have come, and set goals about where we really want to go. If we don’t know where we are going, we are surely not going to get there!

The danger of being in constant communication with the world is that you will fall into that classic trap of being “too busy earning a living to make any real money.”

Many people go on vacation, but don’t turn off the Blackberry. And as tempting as it is to “just check e-mail for one minute,” it really doesn’t work like that, does it? Any problem you find in your inbox will linger on your mind for hours or days after you shut down the computer, rendering “free time” useless with worry. It’s the worst of states – you experience neither relaxation nor productivity. Another important lesson I’ve learned is that time without attention is worthless, so you should value attention over time.

Will little problems happen? Yes. But put them in perespective. They can be solved. It’s also a great opportunity for team confidence-building: force your people to solve problems on their own, and you might be pleasantly surprised at how things work out. It will build their confidence and your confidence in them at the same time.

The important “big picture” thing is to move on with your life, know where you are going, and make things happen to achieve your goals. These things will more likely happen while you are sitting on the beach or by the pool relaxing, than they will while you are sitting in an office answering emails about trifling matters. And if you do make the time for the big picture goals but you puncture this time with distractions, you won’t have the attention to make effective use of it.

The challenge is to allow urgent things to “fail” – even for a few days – to get to the next level with your potential life-changing and wealth creating tasks.

That’s the challenge I’ll be taking when I leave for my vacations next week. You can do the same.

Editor’s note: This is adapted from an entry on Peter’s personal blog over at www.petermacfarlane.net where he writes about offshore banking, investing and financial privacy. If you would like to read more, considering subscribing to Peter’s RSS feed. You can use a simple web-based service like Google Reader to subscribe to news feeds. For further information click on the buttons to the right of the screen to add to Google, Yahoo etc.