Special Feature on July 28th, 2010 are 2 Successful Women today:

Cybele Negris, President of Webnames.ca and Sharon Lechter, Co-Author of Rich Dad Poor Dad and Founder of Youthpreneur.com

So much to learn from these Career Women about how they started in business and have become a leading expert in their field of work. From humble beginnings, mistakes and lessons — they have shared true insights and wisdom on an upclose and personal conversation.

Available on http://blogtalkradio.com/ladiespowerhour and FREE Subscription at http://ladiespowerhour.ca/subscribe

Ladies Power Hour is a special tribute to being a WOMAN and everything else that come with it. It’s about your LIFE, your PASSIONS and your SUCCESS. This is the ULTIMATE RESOURCE to help you, the career woman and the woman entrepreneur today to:

Dream Big. Achieve More. Build Wealth. Live Well.

You may be starting out in a career, going through a life transition, have become a Mom-preneur, just entered Entrepreneurship or simply, a young woman eager to launch your success! Ladies Power Hour is all about helping women WIN in business and in life.

To Inspire. Educate. EMPOWER you through this amazing platform, in finding and becoming the woman you want to be and grow into Entrepreneurship no matter where you come from, what you have and don’t have — because this is YOUR place to discover, experience and flourish — to be The Successful Woman, in you.”

Summer is usually a time for teenagers to get off the couch, get a summer job, and start to learn how to make  a living.   But it might be more difficult to do that this year because of the financial crisis and large number of people out of work.

But don’t give up – there are ways to find a summer job.  CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield talks to Sharon Lechter, author of the book “Three Feet from Gold,” and head of the financial education group “Pay Your Family First.”

June 24, 2010, 7:00 AM ET

Your Parents’ Money Habits and You

by Sharon Lechter

Decisions you make today about how you spend and how you invest your money will affect you for years to come. Looking at how your parents dealt with money is an important starting point. Did they save money? Did they think of ways to make more money? Or did they agonize over never having enough money? Did your parents say, “We can’t afford it!” more than they said, “How can we afford it?” One statement is scarcity mentality, while the other is abundance mentality.

A few triggers that may help you define your financial upbringing:
•    Did your parents save up for your family vacation, or was it something you did and then stressed about how to pay for when the bills came in?
•    Did one parent shoulder the bulk of the financial responsibility, and complain about it?
•    Did your parents fight about money in front of you?
•    Did your parents make sacrifices to provide for you?
•    You may have been protected from family financial traumas. Ask your parents what they would have done differently with their money at your age. Did they have a budget, a savings account for a rainy day or invest early in the stock market, or did they live paycheck to paycheck? Let them know you value their insight and give them time to prepare for the conversation. Given the current economic crisis, they may be willing to share more freely with you.

Now that you have analyzed how your parents dealt with money, how will you?
•    You have a golden opportunity. Recognize the positive lessons you learned from your parents and keep them, but also commit yourself to not repeating the negative ones.
•    Adopt the “pay as you go” plan and stay out of debt.
•    Set a goal (taking a vacation) and then when you achieve it, celebrate achieving the goal. Enjoy the well-deserved vacation! It beats the alternative—going into debt for a vacation and then fretting over how you are going to pay for it for months after the good memories have faded.
•    Start “paying yourself first” by automatically saving a percentage of your income each and every month.

Will your mindset be one of scarcity (never having enough) or abundance (planning and achieving)? It is your choice. For now, you still drive your own financial future.

Sharon Lechter is a CPA, author of “Three Feet from Gold” and co-author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad.”

Start by looking in the mirror. As you evaluate your situation, ask yourself how you spend your time. Do you spend your time productively? Do you get the job done?

It’s been said that time is our most precious resource. We can always make more money or replace what we have lost, but there’s absolutely no way to replace the past minute of time we just spent. If you grasp how precious time really is, then you won’t waste it.

Just as monitoring your money flow – the making and spending of money – is important, even more important is to take a real hard look at where and how you spend your time. Most people have no idea of how much time they lose every day, every week or every month. This lost time when put to productive activities could add a much needed part time income or be just enough to start a new business.

Take action and record where you spend your time each day for the next month. Evaluate and consider where you could be more productive. Watch out for time wasters and limit your focus on those activities. Just by monitoring and being aware you’ll gain productivity as you choose to be more efficient.

Share your thoughts with us so we can guide you to your success.

Pay Your Family First is a company dedicated to providing financial education for families. Our goal is to ignite the entrepreneurial spirit and a love for learning. Join us! www.payyourfamilyfirst.com.

- – - – - -
Sharon Lechter

CEO – Pay Your Family First
Co-author of Three Feet From Gold and Rich Dad Poor Dad
Member of the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Literacy
Member of the National CPA’s Commission on Financial Literacy of the AICPA

 Do you ever feel like you have “ATM” tattooed across your forehead? 

 Do your kids (or Grandkids) think money grows on trees, and that you are the tree? 

 Do you even know how much money you actually give to your children?  Even if you give your children an allowance, there’s that extra $20 here and $10 there. And let’s not forget the money for the popcorn at the movie, when your child conveniently “forgets” to give you the change.

 Our children are with us when we spend our money, but they are not with us when we make it. So they don’t understand the simple fact that before it goes out, it must come in.  (insert following article)

 JUST CHARGE IT!

 Your children are quick studies when it comes to spending money.  They see you spending money all the time…just in the course of daily living.  They go to the mall with their friends and learn all about the latest trends because they want to appear “cool” to their friends.

 The problem, however, is that your children are not typically with you when you make your money.  They don’t see all the effort that goes into earning a living.  They may see you leave the house in the morning and come home at night, but they probably don’t understand what you are doing all day.  What they see is the stress that you bring home to the family.  They start saying, “I don’t want to work as hard as you do, Mom and Dad. I want a life!”  These are actual statements that my children have made to me and my husband.  They were sobering, to say the least!

 But what they didn’t fail to experience was the “spending” part of our lives.  The fruits of our labor, you might say.  They enjoyed the spoils (OR: “goodies”), but did not appreciate the efforts that produced those spoils (OR: “goodies”).

 This fact was brought home to me one day when my children were younger.  I had had a very stressful day at work (can you relate?) and was still somewhat preoccupied. My children and I were out shopping for school supplies and my youngest son saw a new video camera he wanted me to buy for the family (for once it was not just for him).  In my not so wonderful way, I said “No, we don’t have the money for that!”

His response was, “Just charge it!  Put it on one of your credit cards!”

 At that moment, I realized that my son understood the spending part of credit cards, but not the paying part of credit cards.  My kids were with me when I was buying things on my credit cards, but not with me when I paid the bills each month.

 I happen to love my credit cards. They make buying things easier. However, I pay them off each month so that I am not charged interest.  But I realized my children didn’t know this! They didn’t know this, because I hadn’t told them.

 In this generation, credit cards have become the payment of choice.  Intentionally or not, our children have learned instant gratification through our actions.  By falling prey to “just charge it” impulses, we are teaching our children the wrong message.  94% of young people surveyed say they learn their financial habits from their parents (that’s us).

  ACTION STEP:

 When your next credit card bill comes in, review it with your children.  Discuss what it felt like when you bought something.  Are you still enjoying it?  Do you still have it?  How does it feel to pay for it AFTER the fact?  Is it as much fun paying for it as it was buying it?

 Sharing the “paying” side of life will educate your children about both sides of the money equation—buying and paying. Knowledge is power. 

 WHY NOT?

 Why don’t we teach our children about money?  Could it be because we don’t know much about it?  Chances are you weren’t taught about money in school, either.

 Everything I learned about money, I learned from my Dad.  His rule was simple. Half of every thing I earned from my part-time jobs went into a savings account.  Every other week, my parents drove me to the bank to deposit that 50% into a passbook savings account. I would never have even thought about withdrawing money from that account. When I started driving, the habit continued, and, yes, my parents would check up on me.  Did I like putting the 50% in the bank at the time?  Of course not, but after tithing 10% to my church, I could spend the other 40% any way I liked.  My parents didn’t “control” how I spent it.  I realize now that my saving, giving, investing and spending habits today became habits when I was still at home under consistent guidance from my parents.  I cannot stress the word consistent strongly enough.

 Unfortunately, my children didn’t benefit from the same instilled habits.  I used the same lessons my dad had taught me, but with much different results.

 I didn’t factor in the existence of credit cards. They didn’t exist when I was in high school.  I felt that teaching good habits to my children would make them understand the perils of credit card debt.  It didn’t.  I hear parents say all the time, “I am not going to give my kids credit cards.” and for a long time I felt that way too.  But the harsh reality is, your kids will sign up for credit cards when they go to college—and you probably won’t even know it.  Wouldn’t it be better to let them make the mistakes while they are still at home, while you may still have SOME influence over their decision-making?

 Phil’s Story:

During my later high school years, I worked for my spending money.  I worked for a few different retail stores, and my parents had a rule for me.  That was that 50% of what I earned had to go into a savings account that I could not touch.  I never understood the rule, only that my parents would check up on me to be sure that I made the appropriate deposits.  As I entered my first semester of college, I was given some great opportunities to obtain credit.  I recall the first week that I moved into my dorm at Arizona State University there was a table out front of the dorm room.  All I had to do was write down my name, address, and social security number, and then sign something. Suddenly, I had $500 dollars.  That was awesome!

I recall that I had about $2500 in my savings from working.  It took me months to save that kind of money, but mere minutes to have access to $500. I started to use my credit card and it was not long before I had a few more, as I could save 10% at my favorite clothing store.   That 10% savings on a $200 purchase turned into a 22% interest and a delinquency on my credit for $9. {It wasn’t until 6 years later that I looked at my credit and realized that I had a delinquency of $9.  I was able to handle that with the creditor, as well as clean up another issue and my credit score surged by close to 50 points over the next couple months.} 

 By the end of my first year in college, I was close to $2000 in debt, and I had no job.  I had a conversation with my parents—actually I asked them to bail me out and they responded with a resounding ”No!”  They did the best thing for me; they told me I had to get a job and handle it.  What I had not told them at the time was that I had also burned through my savings of $2500, too.  I swung by $5000.  From the summer after my first year of college, I worked.  Still it was tough, though, as I was only working 20 hours a week (weekends and evenings) and after taxes that was just above the minimum payment of my credit cards.  This was when I got the biggest lesson about credit cards—the challenge of paying a minimum payment.  I would pay my minimum payment and then I would get my next statement and even though I had not charged anything new my balance was going up.  ‘Going up?’ I thought. But I made my payment, that was when I went and asked my mom why that was.

 What an awakening!  Now I understood why she always said that she paid off her credit cards every month…  That my interest per month was more than my minimum payment.  After years of working more hours over the summer and making payments as I could, I finally achieved a zero balance on my credit card.  I remember this day, as I had used the zero balance statement for a “show and tell” during the Dale Carnegie course I took prior to joining the Rich Dad Company.  I was so proud that I was able to pay off my credit card.

 I also, was not as consistent with my children, as my parents were with me.  A habit is formed as a consistent method of response or activity.  The definition of habit in Webster’s College Dictionary is:

            “Habit – an acquired pattern of behavior that has become almost involuntary as a result of frequent repetition.”

 Consistency is imperative in forming a habit, good or bad.  Repetition creates the pattern of behavior.  For instance,

•  Alcoholics drink consistently
• Smokers smoke consistently
• People in debt spend consistently
• Philanthropists give consistently
• Savers save money consistently
• Investors invest money consistently

 In order to change your life, you need to start by changing your habits.  In order to teach our children to be productive and successful adults, we need to help them form habits that produce positive results for them consistently at a young age.  It is easy to look at the list above and know that you would prefer your children to be savers, investors, and philanthropists instead of alcoholics, smokers, or debtors.  It is much more difficult as a parent to find the time to take the action NOW to help instill the habits that will propel your children toward a financial future of successful investing instead of a financial future plagued with drowning in debt.

 Turn Your Concern into Positive Action!

 The cost to our children and our society is getting too high not to take action NOW.  The incidence of drug abuse, alcoholism, teenage suicide, and pregnancy is rising and it will most likely hit closer to home than you want to imagine.  It is time for parents, grandparents, and other interested adults to start educating our children today…so they can live a happy and healthy tomorrow.

 I share my own story because I don’t want parents to “do what I did.”  I want you to learn from my mistakes.  And yes, I am saying “do what I say, not what I did.”  I truly felt I was teaching my children about money, but it wasn’t good enough!  It wasn’t consistent enough. As a result, my children have learned the hard way—by getting into debt and having to work hard to not only get out of it, but also to start to repair their credit history.

 So these are the two extremes.

 First, mine, where I learned good habits and have never “experienced” being deeply in debt. There were many times in our lives where money was very tight for my husband and me and we were totally stressed out about money.  Money problems create one of the greatest stresses in a marriage, but working through those stressful times can also create magic in a marriage and family.  Mike and I agreed never to carry balances due on our credit cards. We paid, and continue to pay, them off each and every month.  It wasn’t easy, but it was our way to know we were in control over our financial life.

 And then there were our children, who have gotten deeply into debt and had to “work” their way out.  My message to you is there is a better way.  Give your children the tools to become independent, the tools to make mistakes—and most importantly, to learn from them.  Give them those tools while you are still around to be their mentor and support system.

 When I graduated from college, I had $22,000 in the bank because of the habits I learned from my father.  Today many young people graduate from college that much in debt, if not more. They start their adult lives already in the hole financially.

 Please join my effort in “Calling All Parents, and Grandparents, too”.  You can truly make a difference in your child’s or grandchild’s life.

 WHAT CAN YOU DO?

 There is no lack of good financial education content available—and much of it is even free and available on-line.  The problem is execution. Unless we take the time or make the time to teach our children about money, chances are they will never learn it.

 We are still not teaching money skills in school.  While there are many wonderful organizations dedicated to improving financial literacy, and they are reaching more children every year, can you afford to wait?  Can your children afford for you to wait?

 I have also talked to many parents who have the fear of needing to have the right answers and taking the time to teach their children.  At least we can encourage them to learn more and support them.  In today’s day and age, often we are learning together with our children.  Instead of having to be the one with all the answers I have trained myself to become a leader more than an instructor.  It is critical that we as parents draw out of our children and not just try to put in.  Our children have access today to the same information that we do, so let’s learn together.  Let’s achieve together.

 The other frustration I have is the lack of actual “Action Steps” in all the information available.  There are a lot of lessons, and a lot of  “you should’s”, but not enough “here’s how’s.”  There is little or no practical advice, so I understand when other parents, say “I just don’t know how to get started.”  This program has been developed as a result of that frustration.  Some of the action steps we will provide will make sense and feel good to you while others may not work for you or feel like “too much effort.”  Listen to your own inner voice as to what you want to do, and will do.  If you’re ready to turn your concern into action, you will find definitive action steps that you can take to teach your children the basic financial principles they will need to not only survive—but to thrive—in the world they face.

 Pay Your Family First is a company dedicated to creating and providing financial education products that teach financial education in a fun and experiential way.  Our goal is to ignite the entrepreneurial spirit as well as the love for learning in young people today.  For more information please visit www.payyourfamilyfirst.com.

 The credit card regulations which went into effect on February 22, 2010 will prevent credit card companies from soliciting within 1000 feet of college campuses.  While this is a huge step in the right direction it is still critically important for parents and grandparents to teach their children about money.  Let them stub their toes while they are still at home instead of breaking their legs when they leave home!

 Thank you

Sharon Lechter

CEO – Pay Your Family First
Co-author of Three Feet From Gold and Rich Dad Poor Dad
Member of the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Literacy
Member of the National CPA’s Commission on Financial Literacy of the AICPA

I am so excited to share with you that our friend, DC Cordova,
a Global Entrepreneur, and CEO of Excellerated Business Schools®
and the Money & You® Program, and I recorded a Tele-class where we shared
about the powerful tools that have been used by some of the most successful
mentors and business leaders worldwide which can support you in creating a
great business and move you to a whole other level in this New Economy.

On this call you’ll learn specific principles of the Business Success Model
that work each and every time, without fail, and have been used by millions
to help create THEIR fortunes.

Access this great Tele-class by login:
http://www.MoneyandYou.com/sharon

One of her (and many others’) key to success is the ability to do business
globally and to have access to international markets through powerful
networks of successful entrepreneurs from not only North America, but
also from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Taiwan,
Hong Kong and all throughout China!

Let me share a bit about her work and her world-famous
Money & You® program…

Over the past 30 years, through programs, her organization has
shown many successful entrepreneurs how to discover untapped
markets during turbulent financial times.

Many of her graduates discovered new business strategies after
the 1987 market adjustment, the recession in the early 1990’s
and during the high-tech bubble a few years ago.  Their graduates
are creating new opportunities right now, in this market, as you
read these words.

Entrepreneurship involves finding niche opportunities where
others are afraid to look.

Her Money & You® Program has been attended by many of
today’s wealth/business leaders and “gurus”.  

Consider joining  her February 25 – 28 in San Diego,
and learn the inside strategies that took the likes of (and many other)
entrepreneurs to new heights in their businesses by making them
immune to economic fluctuations:

Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen of Chicken Soup for Soul Series
Anthony Robbins, world-renown Success Coach
T. Harv Eker, best selling author The Millionaire Mind
Alex Mandossian, renown Marketing Expert
Janet Switzer, renown Marketing and Publishing Expert
Loral Langemeier, best selling author, Wealth/Business builder
Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream
Paul Mitchell co-founder of the billion-dollar hair products company
Spencer Johnson, author of the One-Minute Manager & Who Moved my Cheese
Mari Smith, Social Media Expert
Myself, Sharon Lechter, CPA, Entrepreneur, Philanthropist, co-author Rich Dad Series

The program is experiential, and in three-and-half days, you’ll learn
44 hours of Entrepreneurship and how to become a business leader.

Once you attend this program, you have a lifetime membership to attend
any Money & You® program for FREE any where in the world.  
You’ll have a ready made network for you to promote your products
and services – you can easily connect with companies and successful
Entrepreneurs from those countries.

If you would like to learn more about the program now, you can login:
http://www.moneyandyou.com/sharon

Right now they are offering a special where you can bring a second
person for half the regular tuition of $1,995.
That is only $997 each when two people register together!

If you would like to speak to one of her Money & You® team members,
you are welcome to call: 1-619-224-8880  or e-mail:  info@MoneyandYou.com

Wishing you tremendous success!

Sharon Lechter

• The average credit card balance in students rose 60 percent…
• Student loan balances increased by 90 percent…
• Three times as many students cut back on classes…
• Student trust in financial institutions declined by 40 percent…
• There was a 25 percent increase in students using one credit card to pay off another…

For the complete report, executive summary, press release and previous research, visit www.nefe.org/aplus

Read more: www.time.com

Thank you Jim Piccolo for your support!

Visit thrivetimegame.com for more information.