In the financial investment word, you often hear the term ‘Asset Allocation’.

Asset allocation is a term used to refer to how an investor distributes his money (assets) among various classes of investment vehicles (e.g., stocks and bonds). Depending on the persons goals and desired level of risk, the asset strategies can be quite varying. Even if an investor is going for aggressive growth and high risk, he will often spread his money over a number of investment.
The logic being that not all your eggs are in one basket. If one investment crashes you don’t loose everything.

What about your personal assets?

Your strengths and skills are the assets that make it possible to earn a livelihood.

Most people have one source of income, a few have some investments that give some dividend revenue, or are set up as a retirement fund, but those are often set up for when the person retires and no longer has their main income source.

If putting all of your financial asset in one investment is a foolish idea, is it not equally foolish to invest all your personal assets in only one job/career/source of income?

Job security is a thing of the past. Todays ever changing world requires strategies for ensuring that you always have a continual source of income.

The strategy.

Effectively allocating your personal assets to create multiple streams of income.
When you know your strengths and skills you can effectively direct them to opportunities that will generate income (active/passive) for you.

A good example of personal asset allocation is Dave Gordon. Dave is a skilled writer and speaker. He as used this ability to:

Become a freelance journalist.
Create a University based news paper.
Work as an editor for the National Post.
Set up a blog.
Start is own radio show.
Write a book.
Note taker for University Grad Students

I’m sure there are more, but seven streams of income mean that Dave always has money coming in. He could loose half his income portfolio and still be financially sound.

The starting point is discovering your strengths and skills. There is a site called Authentic Happiness.
On the site there are an assortment of free assessments that you can take. The “VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire”
measures 24 character strengths, and is a good starting point to help gain awareness of where to focus your energies.
After beginning to get an idea of your strengths and skills, you can put a strategy together to allocate your assets.

Two books by Robert G. Allen are worth reading.

Multiple Streams Of Income

and

Multiple Streams Of Internet Income

Both of Allen’s books give you some great ideas on how you can direct your talents.

Placing all your personal assets in one basket(job), is a recipe for disaster. Were will you be if that source of income is cut off.

Taking control of your abilities can lead you to enhanced control of your income, your life, and your freedom. Your future is defined by the actions you take now. Begin to discover your strengths, skills and passion. Then play with the possibilities, where else can your value be realized.

If you hit a wall feel free to contact me. I would be glad to assist you in reaching your highest potential.

Have a great weekend.

Desire+Educated Action = Success

Jim is watching the news this morning, and he hears how a company is being bought out at $18/share. Later in the day his friend Eric brings up the same news, happily telling Jim how he had bought $10,000 of that share when 5 years ago when it was $0.55. Jim does some quick math in his head, and almost falls over when he realized that in the past five years his friend made $317,000 on that $10,000 investment.
For the next few days Jim can’t stop thinking about the investment. He also wants to have that kind of success. A few days later, Jim signs up with an online broker, and gets ready to begin his successful trading career.

Jim does a search for penny stocks on oil companies (he heard that Oil is big), he notices that one had gone up 10 cents to 50 cents in the past month. Jim feels this could be the one and buys $10,000, and begins to dream about all the things he will buy with the big windfall. A month later the stock is up another 20 cents, Jim is thrilled he has made $4000, his dream is coming true. A few days later the stock starts moving down, Jim is not worried, he know that there are ups and downs, ‘it will come back’. After a month the stock is down to 40 cents, Jim has lost $2000, but stays in the stock, because he wants to ‘get back his losses’. Three years later the stock is still hovering around 40 cents, and unfortunately for Jim, he never sold and never invested any more.

In that same time period Eric had two more big trades, and all Jim could think to himself was that Eric has such good luck.

What was Jim’s mistake? Was Eric really just lucky?

Though Jim and Eric had similar backgrounds; Grew up in the same town, live in the same area, both engineers, Jim was missing something that Eric had. When Eric decided to start investing, he realized that he needed information. How to analyze stocks, when to get in/out, how to get in/out, how much to invest, etc.
Realizing this Eric signed up for a basic investment training course, a four evening course, outlining a basic understanding of how the markets work and basic analysis of stocks that cost around $1200.00. After the course he did about six months of paper trading(no money) and only then prepared for his first trade. Over the the next two and half years Eric took two more advanced trading courses, also about $1200.00. With continual practice and guidance from his teachers, Eric was able to realize some increadible gains in the stock market.

Eric wasn’t lucky, he was intelligent. He realized that in order to succeed you need the right information.

Desire is great, but without the proper information and education you are just spinning your wheels.

The incredible thing is that education is abundant and inexpensive, you can often find courses tailored to your needs for $250-$1000 per course. Less than $4/day. Heck I spend more than that on my daily Latte.

The other important factor to be aware about is that education is not an expense, it’s an INVESTMENT.

Anytime you spend money on something that will bring you a return greater than what you spent that is called a good investment.

The best investment in your future would be to begin a “wealth” education fund for yourself. Take out a jar, or set up another account and put $50-$100 per month in. Decide what interests you; stocks, real estate, coaching, jewelry making, woodworking. Find some courses in your area of interest, and whenever you have sufficient funds in your account take the course.

Desire+Educated Action = Success

Oh Yeah, the title of the post.
A person can take a specialized course at a college or poly-technical university for around $5000 and make an average salary of $30,000. People like Eric raise the bar, so can you…