Jade Jean Blog

“How’s it going, Mary?” She sensed that he cared. “I’m getting it, David,” she replied. “I’m feeling good.” It had been a long time since she’d said that

The little wealth class reconvened. It was 11:15 A.M. I stood in front of them, taking in their enthusiasm. I had hidden my doubts well. But there was still so much material to cover. I was already behind an hour. Maybe more. The two days were slipping away. Could I instill in them the confidence necessary to withstand the rejections of the next ninety
days? On the drawing board, the Challenge had seemed noble and possible. But in front of me sat real people with real problems. Serious
problems. Maybe I was just adding to them. We had come such a short
way. The task before us seemed insurmountable. The cliff looked so steep. The rocks of failure seemed to far below. “One foot in front of the
other,” I whispered to myself.

“So,” I began, “find it. Fund it. Farm it. Three simple steps. But not so easy to execute. Your job is to find what glitters; I’ll tell you whether it’s gold or not. But how can you tell if it glitters? Let’s talk about the
five components of value. Look at the chart.”

Taken From:The ROAD TO WEALTH

Instead, she threw herself into trying to find a job. But she wouldn’t settle for anything less than a perfect job. One that would allow her to
spend as much time as possible with her children. When she told this to
prospective employers they would laugh. “You’ll have to choose between work and family,” they said.

She chose work. She took a job at Hertz, where she lasted less than a
week. And so the spring passed by. She rode the roller coaster of her
emotions—self versus family. A churning pot of mixed desires. Until the
morning in June when she had been selected for the Challenge.

Mary hung up the phone. As she did so, the sparkle of the diamond in
her wedding ring caught her eye. She pulled it closer to examine it.
“Until you know value, everything is worthless.” She repeated the lesson
in her mind. And she knew that she would never look at a diamond the
same way again.

She walked back into the seminar room. The room was still hot. She
joked with the camera crew. They liked her. She could tell. David Benjamin, the film producer, came over to talk to her. He was fast becoming the father figure to the group. Maybe it was his bald head and red, bushy beard. Even dressed in his jeans, he might have been a monk in disguise.

Taken From:The ROAD TO WEALTH

To fight back the guilt and growing bitterness, she threw herself into
church work. She taught Sunday school, organized the children’s choir,
sat on the women’s missionary committee. On the outside, she tried to
maintain the facade of perfection, the capable woman who could handle
everything. But on the inside she was dying—confused and unhappy.

In April, Steve urged he r to see an employment counselor. Maybe a job would help her to be happy, to find herself. The counselor just happened to be a psychologist.

“Whose music are you dancing to?” he would ask her. “Why do you think that if you don’t spend every second in the home with your children you’ll be a terrible mother? Who told you that working mothers
don’t spend enough time with their children?”

For the first time, she felt she was getting somewhere. But the counselor was expensive—fifty dollars an hour. And that made her feel
even guiltier. You can buy a lot of groceries for fifty dollars. So she
stopped seeing him.

Taken From:The ROAD TO WEALTH

But when Kyle came, some new feelings began to swell in her. There had been a lot of unspoken pressure from her husband and his family to
produce a male that could carry on the name. She somehow expected
her happy. But it didn’t.

“What’s wrong with me?” she asked herself. “I have two wonderful
children. A great husband. Why do I cry all the time? Why do I snap at
Steve?”

There was a void in her life that beckoned to be filled. Maybe she felt she was wasting away at home—shackled to two toddlers, unable to pursue her dreams, whatever they might be. She was miserable. And guilty. Because a minister’s wife isn’t supposed to be miserable. She attacked her housework to fight back the guilt. The house had to be immaculate. She ironed everything. Made bread from scratch. No premixed packages for her.

Where did this compulsion come from? Not from her own mother, who had always worked and had employed part-time maids and babysitters.
Not from Steve. He loved the great home-cooked meals, but peanut butter and jelly would have been just fine for him. Maybe she was trying to live up to her image of the perfect wife and mother, married to the perfect husband. It was a heavy burden, for there is no heavier burden than trying to be someone you’re not.

Taken From:The ROAD TO WEALTH

Mary went to the phone out in the hall to call her baby-sitter. Her head was still swimming with numbers, but she was beginning to grasp the basic concepts. She dialed home. “Hello, Judy? How are the kids?”
“Just fine, Mrs. Bonenberger.” “Did Kyle take the bottle?” “He didn’t like it at first, but as soon as he could tell that it was your milk, he guzzled it.”

Mary breathed a sigh of relief. Kyle was still not weaned from his mother’s breast. She had worried that the baby would not take a milk bottle and so, early that morning, she had used a nursing pump to drain
some of her milk for Kyle to drink. She was relieved to hear that he was
drinking it.

As she stood at the phone she could tell that her breasts were beginning to fill up again. Before the day was out, unless she could empty her breasts, she would be in the kind of agony that only a nursing
mother can comprehend. It was just one of the many minor sacrifices
that she had made in order to make herself available for the two-day
training.

But she was no stranger to sacrifice. Even while pregnant with Kyle, she had contributed her part toward the family budget by making and selling crafts at weekend craft fairs. But the hours were long— sometimes she would stay up till two or three o’clock in the morning sewing—and the dollars were few. She slaved on till Kyle was born in March of 1984.

Taken From:The ROAD TO WEALTH

Karen looked puzzled. “What do you mean by farm it?” “Just like a farmer, you plant seeds and you harvest crops. An idea is a seed. You plant it by buying the property. You harvest it when you get the money out. How do you get the money out? Whenever you buy a property you have four choices:

1. Keep it and rent it out for positive cash flow
2. Sell it immediately for profit
3. Keep it and refinance it for cash
4. Trade it for something else, which you can either keep, refinance,
sell or trade again.

“Tom did all of these things in farming his property. He traded his
house for a mobile home, which he refinanced for cash and then sold. He
still has the boat and the note.

“He found someone with a problem, and by solving it, he created an
opportunity. Most people are programmed to hate problems. Assuming
that problems are bad, they run from them, hide from them, divo rce them or drink themselves into forgetting them. But a creative person loves problems because he knows every problem contains an opportunity. He is a diamond miner. “And so are you,” I concluded.
“Let’s take a ten- minute break.”

Taken From:The ROAD TO WEALTH

“One particularly motivated mobile-home owner agreed to accept Tom’s proposal. Tom traded his house with his $16,000 equity for an $8,000 free-and-clear mobile home, a motorboat worth $4,000 and a note of $4,000 with monthly payments of $100 until the balance was paid in full. They both won. The mobile-home owner moved up to a house. Tom ended up with a free-and-clear mobile home, a boat and $100 a month
income.”

“But he still doesn’t have cash,” Steve protested. “How can we solve that problem?” I kept throwing the questions back to the group, forcing them to use and develop their own creativity.

“He could sell the mobile home or boat,” Steve answered. “Yes,” I said, “but what he did was simpler. He borrowed five thousand dollars against the mobile home. Mobile home loans are a lot easier to get than house loans. And then he sold the mobile home for little down.”

They all nodded. “Now, let’s draw some lessons from this,” I said. “First Tom found an opportunity. I call that step one: Find it. Then he used creative financing to buy it. That’s step two: Fund it. Then he traded it for a mobile home among other things, which he financed for cash. That’s step three: Farm it. It’s as simple as one, two, three. Find it. Fund it. Farm it. That’s all I’ll be teaching you in the next two days.”

Taken From:The ROAD TO WEALTH

“Win/win,” I said. “The buyer would get a super buy. You would end up with five thousand dollars cash for your efforts. Can you begin to see
light at the end of the tunnel?” The creativity in the air was thick enough to cut. Steve offered another solution. “Maybe you could sell it for nothing down for sixty thousand dollars?”

“Good idea, Steve. You’re turning into a raging capitalist—a capitalist without capital. Instead of cash up front, you receive payments of a few hundred dollars a month for the next twenty years. There are several solutions to this problem … once you begin looking for them.

“Now, let me tell you what Tom actually did. He persuaded the seller
to refinance the property. The seller walked away with his money and
Tom ended up with the house. Tom then had to figure out how to get his profit out. One day he visited a friend who lived in a mobile home park. He noticed several mobile homes for sale. He reasoned that at least a few of these sellers would like to own their own home but were blocked by large down payment requirements, and strict lending guidelines. Tom put all of these facts together and came up with an ingenious idea. He passed out a flier that said:

I will trade my equity in my home for your free-and-clear mobile home.
Call Tom. 555-1234.

His phone rang off the hook. He had guessed right.

Taken From:The ROAD TO WEALTH

Mary responded. “We bring in a partner. He pays the negative cash
flow for a portion of the profit.” “Look at all of the creative solutions we generated,” I exclaimed. “Most people just assume that it can’t be done and so they never try. A creative person is always looking for a creative solution. Question, Nora?”

“But aren’t we supposed to make five thousand dollars in ninety days. Where does the cash come from?” “Maybe you could sell the property, Steve suggested. “Good,” I said. “Suppose you put this property on the market by running an ad like this:

Excellent rental house.
Appraisal of $60,000.
Will sacrifice for $49,000 with $5,000 down.
Assumable loans.
Call Philip. 567-8911

Do you think that you might attract some attention?” Nodding, Mary added, “It’s great too for a young couple starting out.”

Taken From:The ROAD TO WEALTH

“But suppose you can’t find a partner?” Nora asked. Philip’s mind was abuzz with ideas. “What about asking him to do a second mortgage,” he suggested. The light of understanding also illuminated Mary. “That’s it,” she said. “Have Mr. Motivated borrow the money himself before you buy his property from him.”

I sensed a teaching moment and changed into the role of the seller,
pretending that this solution had just been presented to me. “What?” I asked incredulously. “Why would I want to borrow against my own property?”

Steve caught on to my role-play. “Because, Mr. Motivated, this would be a solution to your problem. You borrow the seventeen thousand dollars, and then I’ll assume your loans and take the property off your hands.”

“Good solution, Steve,” I said. “This may solve the seller’s problem. But what will we do with an empty bargain house and payments of six hundred dollars a month? That’s crazy, isn’t it?” “We can rent it out,” offered Philip. “What if the rent doesn’t cover the payments?” I asked, playing the devil’s advocate.

Taken From:The ROAD TO WEALTH