| My name is Keith Mason and my wife Viebke and I have put together our website to help you find your way to become financially educated so that you may reach your financial goals in life.
This is our story of how we turned around our financial situation in a relatively short timeframe from one of scarcity to plenty.
Money isn’t the most important thing in life (unless you don’t have any) but life is certainly more fun and you have more choices when you have plenty of it. We have found that the journey of creating wealth is an exciting journey with lots of fun and adventure along the way. It has given us freedom to explore life much more fully than we could before. Our goal is to empower you with the same freedom.
Viebke and I struggled in small business for many years, thinking it would give us a good future, only to realise the years were going by and not much was changing, and we were not building a wealthy retirement as there was just not enough money left over each month to invest.
We were paying our mortgage on our small 2 bedroom house (worth around $100k with $60k mortgage, and had no super, but were looking after our employees and paying their super. The government had us working for them, collecting their taxes and doing their bookwork, and kept making life more difficult with more and more legislation for small business to comply with.
We were working very long hours, and were both in our 40’s. If we had not decided to change our situation, we like most Australians would have ended up on the government pension, which is not where we wanted to be. Viebke had been running a small pancake café restaurant for 20 years with her sister, and I had run a furniture manufacturing business.
Both business’s were started on a shoestring. Between us we employed 30 staff, who probably all thought we were on the road to wealth, but in reality we worked hard and long, and had not much to show for it, which I suspect is the story of the majority of small business in Australia.
We began a quest to discover what the rich did differently so that we could share in some of what they had. Our desire was for a life of adventure, lots of overseas travel, adventure sports, being able to see our family in the UK every year. These had been our goals in life all along, but small business had bogged us down. Before starting in business we had both travelled overseas and had a yearning to get back to it, but the small business’s had put a noose around our necks.
We began reading as many books as we could, books such as Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, buying tape sets such as Jim Rohn, and going to seminars on investing in real estate and the sharemarket, even travelling to the USA, learning as much as we could about investing strategies.
We invested a sizeable amount of time and money in our financial education, our library of books and tape sets now almost fills a room in our new office. I suspect many of our friends thought we were crazy, and it wouldn’t work. Some would even put us down for it. (This is probably true for many of you also). We just believed that this was the way we would find the answers to improve our future.
We came across John Burley in the USA who taught us how to invest in real estate for cashflow, which was the first strategy we used. We now have an Australian friend Rick Otton who teaches Aussies how to do similar strategies here in Australia.
By good fortune we came across Jamie McIntyre and 21 st Century Academy, purchased the Homestudy in September 2001, and it was delivered on 9/11, a day we will never forget, and the beginning of a new chapter in our life.
From Jamie we learned how to synergistically use a combination of different strategies, real estate, sharemarket and business/internet marketing to develop cashflow, build assets and create real wealth. His money management techniques helped us get our finances in order, which enabled us to gather together funds for investing. We discovered the importance of having a team of experts and mentors around us to help us achieve our goals.
Jamie is a master of making complicated investing techniques so simple to understand that we were soon able to implement his strategies. For example Jamie coined the phrase “share renting” to explain the covered call strategy. Everyone understands the concept of renting out a house and can relate it to renting out shares. Whereas trying to explain covered calls in the sharebroker jargon to someone, is a far more difficult task.
Initially we went back to basics, focussed on saving 10% of everything we earned (which was not very much at that stage) but by setting the habit and automatically putting the money away into a managed fund, we didn’t miss the money. Gradually we increased the savings, and when the savings grew to a large enough amount, we used it to buy property |
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