Savings paying off!

We all know how important a savings account is. But have we all had to utilize a savings account because of necessity and not for reasons of recreation or investing? Much to my surprise, for the past 4 months I have had to utilize my savings out of necessity while I focus just about 100% of my time to schooling efforts. So even with my wife working full time, it is safe to say that I have somewhat of a testimony of saving from first hand experience. From a financial standpoint, its easy to say, 'Well why not just go work at so and so for minimum x amount of dollars'. Well, my train of thought is more along the lines of making the investment of time into my school this semester will propel me into the down side of the hill of graduating instead of just working anywhere and taking the risk of lower grades which means having to take the same classes again and prolonging the period of time until I graduate. Slippery downhill slope, right? I think so, that is why I finally took this huge risk of not working, or you might want to look at it as an investment (of time)! So anyway, just to refresh the minds, why is graduating from college so big? Well, as an accounting major, I feel that you need a steady stream of income to produce even a frothier and more heady stream of income. Or in other words, you need money to make money. So I could just go be joe shmoe salesman who is perceived as deceiving and just trying to get my cut for the rest of my life. Or I could have invested this semester and used my savings account to maintain our quality of life, and continue to look up and prepare to meet my goals and apirations for my family's future. The underlyiing moral that I planned on writing about was trying to save half of what you make! It might sound like a tough thing to do, but lets face it, anytime is a good time to sacrifice! Becasue saving now, means enjoying sooner than you would expect.

Excel Millionaire

So in my Accounting class the other day we were discussing investments. We discussed the avenue of becoming a millionaire by the age of 70. I have heard of that process several times before from my older siblings and it excited me of course then but I think now that I am older I felt a bit of urgency. The excel spreadsheet that our instructor brought up was I believe 1200 dollars a year at 8 percent. And at the age of seventy, voila`, you are worth over a million dollars. So after analyzing that for awhile, I figured that I want to be worth that in less than 40 years and more like 15 years! And of course that means that I had basically two options that I needed to optimize. So the easy one was I thought, well lets try and just double the amount of money invested per year. So I plan on investing 2500 dollars a year, but then my other dilemma had to be solved and that is of the percent of money that will be working for me. And I know alot of folks wont believe this but I have figured a way to make 16 percent on my investments. Well its not exactly perfected yet, however I have seen it produce 16 percent for 5 consecutive years and I hope to cash in as well. I dont really want to give away this secret until I have it producing at a contstant flow for me but it has to do with real estate.