5 Ways to Invest Your Money For Maximum Profit

http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/5-ways-to-make-your-dollars-make-sense

BECOME YOUR OWN BANKER
There is one absolutely guaranteed place where you can get a rate of return well over 7 percent —in fact, often over 15 percent or 20 percent. Pay off the damn credit cards and stay out of debt! As the Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett, says, “Nobody ever goes broke that doesn’t owe money.” Besides being expensive and self-destructive, credit card debt winds up sucking money out of your community and into the hands of distant banks, back offices, and collection agencies.

[Caveat - In the middle of a deep recession and financial crisis, if your job is uncertain or your home is in foreclosure, it is a good idea to pay only the minimum balance on credit cards so that you can save cash in case of unemployment, as even your credit cards can be frozen by the banks.]

Another consideration underscoring the value of keeping a modest reserve of cash is that we are entering turbulent times. In the last few years, both the stock market and the housing market have tanked and many serious analysts fear that both could crash again, perhaps even more catastrophically. ..... a hedge against uncertainty so he can control in his own federally insured bank account. - and put it in a Locally owned bank and you receive additional dividends as that money will be invested locally in the community, thereby creating more jobs and a more stable local economy -


INVEST IN YOURSELF
Warren Buffett says, “Generally speaking, investing in yourself is the best thing you can do—anything that improves your own talents. Nobody can take it away from you. They can run up huge deficits and the dollar could become worth far less, you’re gonna have all kinds of things happen. But if you’ve got talent yourself and you’ve maximized your talent, you’ve got a terrific asset.”


Think of how many educational courses you could take, how many new skills you could acquire, or how many new degrees you could complete that would increase your earning power. Forget about enrolling in an expensive private university. ....classes to broaden your skills. If .... more than $4,800 in additional pretax income, your education will generate the needed 16 percent rate of return to do better than your tax-deferred IRA. Adrianne McVeigh, a management consultant and clinical psychologist in Atlanta, tells her clients that “the most successful executives and managers invest time and energy in their own self-development.”

INVESTING IN YOUR HEALTH
Everyone knows that prevention of health problems is more cost-effective than treatment. The assumptions required to work out the cost–benefit numbers are admittedly rife with speculation, but there are plenty of low-cost ways most of us would agree would save us more than 16 percent per year. If you’re a smoker, for example, investing several thousand uninsured dollars to quit can pay off in years of longer life with fewer maladies and health-care costs, as well as immediate savings by eliminating hundreds of dollars of cigarette purchases each year. There are similar, if perhaps less dramatic, payoffs by investing in whatever it takes—nutrition classes, exercise programs, spending more cooking healthy meals—to reap the myriad benefits of a healthier you. - cooking classes -

Your reduced electricity bill will not pay your grocery bill after you turn sixty-five. To make this analysis work, you have to be committed to capturing your savings and placing them into some kind of savings account or asset that ultimately pays you an income stream. ....

Read the whole article .....
http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/5-ways-to-make-your-dollars-make-sense



My mom's favorite reminder when I was growing up was: "The only thing that can never be taken from you is your education.". She would know. Communism took away the family businesses, incomes, even the relationships between friends and families changed for the worse when Community Reporting Brigades were established to spy on neighbors.








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april showers
bring may flowers


marzo ventoso
y abril lluvioso
hacen de mayo florido y hermoso



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Ron Paul on Changing Government

Ron Paul Speech at College of Charleston, Sc
Thursday, January 19,2012 - during the Republican Presidential Primary
C-Span -Capital Hill Hearings

Exerts:


"You want to galvanize people and get them excited and put pressure on the people in Washington. ..  What we have to do is change your hearts and your minds to know what you expect from Government.  .. But Government is a reflection of the people.   If the poeple want us to go to war under UN banner and not declare war, and occupy more and more countries..  unless you decide as a generation that enough is enough.  If you want your rights back again ..  We have to hear from the people.  "

"Obviously, you need to tell your Representatives what you believe, and if you disagree with the Bill, you tell him you disagree with the Bill.  Now if there is 2 or 4 of you, it's not going to do any good.  Just yesterday, Rubio switched his vote (on SOPA) because he heard from his people.  Alot of people in Washington aren't philosophically interested.  They're interested in re-election.   That's what motivates most of them, re-election and power.  If there are enough people that send that message, they ... change their mind. ...So what I would do is encourage (you) to contact your Representatives that don't agree with you... "

TERM LIMITS:
"I introduced the first term limit bill even in the 70s when it wasn't even a subject.  We had a chance to vote on term limits in the 1990s, after the Republicans took over in 1994.  We had about 6 votes (none passed). I voted for all of them.  I support term limits, (ME TOO)  but I don't think it's the answer.  ... If you have somebody who believes the same thing (as you) and they leave, and you put somebody else in who believes in the foreign policy, and the monetary policy and the Federal Reserve, and ... all the bailouts.. But what I think you are suggesting is the turn-over you are going to get a better chance...  After we had those 6 votes in the 1990s it was passed by.  Your second option to that is the people who aren't responding to you, there is still such a thing called an election.  You have to work harder at that I guess."

"Government... certainly can't manage all these countries around the world, and I think we've been getting sick and tired of what they're trying to do  (!!)  About the only thing they've been good at is running up the debt."

"But over-all our main issue is that of Individual Liberty.  That's what's made America great.  That's what the Founders fought for.  When you look at the Bill of Rights and the 4th Amendment has been so severely undermined.  If you take the Bill that was passed shortly after 9/11, The Patriot Act, that hasn't given you any more freedom.  That's given you LESS FREEDOM."

"Also yesterday in Washington I introduced a piece of Legislation.  It was my typical very long complicated piece of Legislation.  It was 1 page.  It says repeal that provision in the National Defense Authorization Act that gives the President the authority to arrest Americans by the military and held indefinitely.  I want to repeal that part."



Disclosure - I usually skip parts i don't agree with or in which I'm not very interested .
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Ron Paul on War and Sanctions

Ron Paul Speech at College of Charleston, Sc
Thursday, January 19,2012 - during the Republican Presidential Primary
C-Span -Capital Hill Hearings

Exerpts:

"I want to offer friendship and trade with any one who will accept it.  That would be the opposite of punishing the people of these countries, like in Iran, (where) we are putting punitive punishment and not allowing them to import or export...  so I wouldn't do that, because it hurts the people, never hurts the governments.  In fact, it enhances the power of the government, because there are alot of people in Iran right now who don't like the government.  You offer friendship and trade. And you say, 'well some of these people are bad people.'  Well, did we talk to the Soviets when they were killing hundreds of millions of people as well as China?.  But eventually we got over this.  We should talk to people.   One example I've used frequently is the crises when I was drafted in 1962, with the missile crisis in Cuba.  Kennedy and Khrushchev talked.  We took missiles out of Turkey and (they) took missiles out of Cuba, and we didn't have to have that war.  We need more diplomacy and more talking.."

"We go to a country and we say, look we want you to be our buddy and our dictator, like Mubarak, and give him $40 million and look what happened there.   So if they do our bidding, we give them alot of money.  If they don't do it, then we bomb them and occupy them. In Pakistan we have [had] 3 ways of doing it .  We bomb them, kill innocent people.  They get angry at us and angry at their government and we keep giving money to their government.  No, the founders were right.  The more trade and communication with people, the less likely we are to fight with them.  When I was in high school we were fighting the Chinese, so I was delighted when Nixon decided to talk with them. Just think what was achieved in Vietnam.  The French and the Americans probably killed over a million Vietnamese, we finally left, we lost 60.000 Americans, ... many more sick and injured .. finally we leave and guess what?  There was no Communist domino effect.  They became westernized. China became our banker, and we invest in Vietnam. All achieved through peaceful means and not war.  This is why I think we should be talking to people.. "

"This doesn't mean you have to condone what they do.  And if they are a threat and they have nuclear weapons, I don't want anyone to get anymore nuclear weapons.  I don't want the Iranians to have nuclear weapons. But we contained the Soviets.  They had 30,000 of them.  So the last thing we need is a war in Iran over a weapon they don't have."

"Keynes and Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics" by Nicholas Wapshott :

"What Keynes found at the Peace talks in Paris (end of WWI) shocked him.  ... He believed that to deliberately beggar a modern trading nation like Germany was to impose crippling poverty on its citizens, which would provide the conditions for extreme politics, insurrection, and revolution.  Rather than bringing a just end to World War I, Keynes thought the Treaty of Versailles was planting the seeds of WW II.  Back home, he penned The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a devastating indictment of the folly of the allied leaders.  (xvii)  ...  Keynes's predictions that the burdensome reparations would lead to political instability and extremist politics would turn out to be chillingly prescient." (p.5 )

Henry Kissinger on "Charlie Rose" on Bloomberg channel, Febuary 6, 2012:

Kissinger:  They believe, or some people when I was in Russia, argued that the situation in Syria is going to become chaotic.  That all these various groups are going to become .. a kind of civil ware between factions.   .. Well my perception, first of all, at this point, there is not alternative to the change of government in Syria.... Change in government is now inevitable.  I have my own doubts that it's possible to negotiate an outcome agreeable to all sides.  It should be attempted....  But if you ask me for my prediction for what is likely to happen, I think there is a great danger that Syria will be in turmoil for a substantial period of time.

Rose:  "But is there anything that the United States or the west can do about that???

Kissinger: "Probably not...  Not every problem of the world has a short-term solution.   In the 19th century somebody said, 'once a play is started, it will be completed either by the actors or by the audience who mount the stage."

Rose:   In Libya, was the west, France, Britain, the United States, right to do what they did, ... leading to the overthrow of a man like Qadafi ?

Kissinger:   I had great doubts about the policies, for the following reasons.  Qadafi. ... at this stage of his evolution had maintained tolerable relations with the west.  I am worried about a situation in which there is no central government left in Lybia...  In which the west will be put into the position of nation building in a society that hasn't been a nation. Again it's one of those things in which once the process had started it had to be brought to a conclusion.  ...  I am very uneasy a country in which militant groups occupying parts of each country, which is sort of the Somali condition, which could become a center of radicalism. ... Where we started, I could understand the concern to prevent a massacre in Bengazi.  But we have to learn or understand that revolutions rarely end the way their organizers proclaim them.   And once you start that process, it has its own momentum.

Rose:  But can't you argue that stability and the status quo is not always in the best interest of the long term ??

Kissinger:  Absolutely I agree with that.  ...  I don't think it was possible or perhaps even desirable to avoid the outbreak of the Arab Spring.

Kissinger:   The 2nd phase of a revolution is to distill, out of this bundle of resentments, an organizing group that can restore enough authority so that you can conduct long-range policy.  That then becomes a very difficult problem.  And if it doesn't go well that isn't our fault.  That doesn't mean we could have avoided it.  But we ought to understand it.  ...

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