Week 2: Numbers For A Dream Lifestyle

Apology: Dream Lifestyle In Abeyance

I am going to keep this really simple in a talk about dream lifestyle.

Week 2: The Number

I have in the back of my head the idea to write a book. It is called Spanning the Continents: The Circles of Life. I have lived in 4 continents now and worked in 5. I have ridden a bicycle in all 5 and I have spanned Australia 7 times now, all in the last 15 years. I have not had a job for 17 years. It is a long story of hard choices and that can go in the book.

Making Choices for a Dream Lifestyle

I have to admit that I have never set objectives for myself. Maybe I was just lucky. Or was it just luck? Maybe it had more to do with the choices I did make? Writing up the dream lifestyle is quite challenging for me sitting here in my 62nd year and not having had a job since I was handed the redundancy letter in April 2001. 17 years and not a single paycheck and 15 years since my last client invoice was paid.

You see I bought my dream house overlooking the ocean in 2000 when I moved to Australia. My ex-wife lives there with my 3 adult children. I bought my dream car newly imported from Japan in England in 2000 too. I moved to Australia 8 weeks later and sold it. I bought another one (same sensible 4 door sport mean machine) when I got to Australia. I still have it 18 years later – that is not the way dream lifestyle people do it.

When I sold my business in 1999, my father gave me a book. The Millionaire Next Door. The book researches the story of American millionaires and how they got their money and how they live. Mostly, the researchers found that they built their fortunes doing what I was doing – build a business. Mostly they held onto their millions by being wise with their spending. It was not about flash cars and worldwide travel and expensive dinners out and private education. I began to understand this when my father died and I worked through his numbers. He had assembled a few millions through wise investing in stocks and in property and careful spending. This was long before the days of million dollar salary checks for large corporate executives. He was living the millionaire next door lifestyle quietly in an unassuming way – yes he did have a nice house but he drove a Japanese car and kept it three years longer than anyone else. Yes we did go to private (boarding) schools basically so that he had more space to do business trips all over the world . My mother was certainly not decked out in expensive jewelry and fashion clothes – she made all of that stuff herself.

Dream Lifestyle Lessons

When the Dot.com crash wiped out the company I sold my business to, I lost two thirds of my fortune ( a paper fortune of stock that had not vested) and about 30% of the investments I had made in technology stocks. I also lost my job and was given 30 days by the Department of Immigration to leave Australia or file an application for permanent residence based on building a business. I filed. I built and ran that long enough so I could satisfy the Department’s rules and then get back to my dream life. I just wanted to be at home when my children came home from school. My father never was. I wanted to play golf and do some fishing while they were at school. I wanted to coach the football team and the cricket team. I was doing all of that – that was my dream lifestyle.

Family time at the beach

That was all torn away. Our dream and lifestyles were diverging. They did and we did. The dream went out like a puff of smoke on a breezy day.

That is why I don’t do dreams. The only time I ever did it was smashed. So you can see, my motivations for doing the Quick Start Challenge as a way to kick start an Internet Marketing business have nothing to do with a dream lifestyle. I have a house. I have a car. I can pay my bills. I can travel. I can ride my bicycle. I have a new shared life. I have worked hard over the last 4 years learning how to manage my own investments to keep growing my assets more than I spend them. In good years, I can rely on that effort. I have lived through two recessions since I sold my business (2000 and 2008). It took 5 years to recover from the first and 8 years from the second.

Quick Start Challenge Number

Stepping back a bit. I have long been something of an IT geek. I love seeing ways to apply technology. I can see opportunity every time I look at new technologies and at the merging of technologies. I love the stuff. It excites me. My teams built the first comparative shopping engines in UK and South Africa before 2000, when Amazon was only a book seller.

Shopping for Barclaycard

I was excited by that and when I went to my first Internet Marketing seminar in 2011 I wanted to get back into doing that stuff. Not for lifestyle but because I can and it is fun. I have learned the hard way though that Internet Marketing never works well if it is a hobby. Take up golf or cycling or model building or model railways if you want a hobby is what I have learned. I have just not been focused enough – maybe the number will help.

In the Last Chance Saloon for Internet Marketing I am going to put a number on it. I want to build my business so that it generates half the revenues that I generate each year from my investing activity. That way I will be able to navigate a safe passage through the next market collapse without having to change my current lifestyle. In number terms, that is a round A$100,000 (US $75,000). As it happens that is not far off the amount that I have spent to date on building my Internet Marketing toolkit. Time to win that back.

Now this is going to take some changes. I currently spend 3 to 4 hours every day managing my investing business. I can restructure that by doing less trading stuff and focus more on longer term actions that can be left to run unattended. I just need to build on the disciplines I have applied to my investing stuff and get those working on Internet Marketing. For example, I have written and published over 300 investing journals in the last 2 years. I know what it takes to be a regular blogger – time now to focus it in on what I learn from the Quick Start Challenge.

One last thing to add. I have written down a commitment in all my blog sites that I will donate 10% of the profits from my Internet Marketing activity to my chosen charities. Thus far I have made no profits. I have not been slacking though as have run every year cycling challenges to raise funds for charity using Internet Marketing techniques. It works. I have raised over $20,000 so far. I will raise the game here and change the charity objective to donate 10% of all my revenues to charities of my choice. That really means I have to jump the NUMBER up to A$110,000 – let’s make that a round A$10,000 per month (A$120.000 per year)

Credits

Photographs are mine. IndigoSquare image from BBC.co.uk