November’s CPI report showed consumer prices rising at rates last seen four decades ago.
Inflation is the biggest risk facing the equity market and is likely to end the record long bull-market. Inflation has a long history of eroding the value of financial assets and brings with it higher interest rates as central bankers try to tamp it down.
The annual inflation rate accelerated significantly in 2021, from about 0.5% at the start of the year to over 3% by September. This was driven by increased demand as the economy reopened and by a sharp rise in energy prices, among other factors.
In October, inflation measured by the consumer price index was up 6.2% from a year earlier, the highest annual rate since November 1990. It marked the sixth straight month above 5%. Kiplinger expects inflation to hit 6.6% by year-end 2021 before falling back to 2.8% by the end of 2022 – above the 2% average rate of the past decade.
“Inflation is in the air, and it risks becoming a market issue, an economic issue and a political issue,” says Katie Nixon, chief investment officer at Northern Trust Wealth Management.
As we enter 2022, inflation is expected to remain a risk amid higher food and gas prices, rising pressures from non-energy industrial sectors such as steel and chemicals, higher food and consumer goods prices, and increases in the energy prices.
Economists expect headline CPI to peak between 4.5% and 5% in the first half of 2022 and approach 2.5% year over year by the end of 2022.
Peace is an inner state of well-being and calm. Peace is more than the absence of war and conflict. Peace means wholeness, peace of mind, quietness, or rest. Peace is being well, whole and complete. It means to be in the midst of noise, trouble, turmoil or hard work, and still be calm in your heart and mind. Peace comes when your mind, body and spirit are in harmony. It is the favor blessings from God over our lives.
Joy is a feeling of great happiness; an extreme sense of gladness and delight. A sense of contentment of where we are. It’s an emotion evoked by well-being, success, good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires. Joy is the presence of hope, meaning and purpose in our lives. Spiritual Joy – can be only found in a relationship with God. And, it does not change with the circumstances of life. When Jesus was born, he brought joy into the world along with righteousness and peace. Spiritual joy is a deep cheerfulness and gladness of heart. It is happiness and a calm spirit.
Family. Friends. Peace. Joy.
Wishing you and family the best this Christmas holiday season.
Financial literacy, quite simply, is a prerequisite for financial freedom. Financial Times
Fixing economic, income and wealth inequality across the nation and globe remains a Herculean task. But, by emphasizing basic financial literacy education — to boost budgeting skills, debt knowhow and investment knowledge— need not be. And basic financial understanding can make a vast difference — not just to economically disadvantage communities, but to anyone in virtually any circumstance.
The correlation between high levels of economic and financial inequality and low levels of financial literacy and understanding is one of the starkest. The problems are worsened by low levels of knowledge about how debt interest is calculated, how it compounds and how to mitigate risk or budget effectively.
From the 2014 S&P Global FinLit Survey, only a third of the world’s population were deemed financially literate, according to analysis by the World Bank.
Financial literacy education, done right, can be a source of emancipation for the economically disadvantaged seeking a way out of deprivation.
Targeted at the young, in particular, it can lay down vital foundations for future prosperity and teaching them about risk and investment opportunity. One of the big reasons to target young people is that later in life they become much harder to reach.
Too many children think money grows on trees. They don’t realise that they have to budget all this money as they get older, they’ve got to pay these bills. FinLit should be one of the things that’s taught to prepare the young for the real world.
“Narrowing the financial literacy gap is crucial for narrowing the wealth gap. But financial literacy clearly needs a boost across the social strata too”, says Aimée Allam, executive director of FT FLIC.
The best investment you can make is in yourself and in your financial education. It’s the obvious starting point to building wealth and achieving financial freedom. And, here are seven reasons:
Provides dividends for life that nobody can ever take from you.
Increases your earning potential.
Increases your return on investment.
Improves the quality of your life and finances.
Secures your retirement.
Defends your portfolio from unnecessary losses.
Provides peace of mind around money.
To ensure you become financially free, take the income you think you’ll need in retirement and multiply it by 20. That’s what you need to put away in order to live off the interest without touching your principle.
Determine how much risk tolerance you have as you look to compound the money you’ve set aside for retirement. the billionaire’s secret, whereby they get Risk/Growth-like returns with assets that would fall in the Security asset class. The wealthy risk very little and expect substantial returns.
The most common way to value a stock is to compute the company’s price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio. The P/E ratio equals the company’s stock price divided by its most recently reported earnings per share (EPS).
You can calculate it two different ways, by:
Taking the company’s market cap and dividing it by net income – or,
Dividing a company’s current stock price by earnings per share
You’ll wind up with the same number either way because in the share price approach, both numbers have already been divided by the total number of shares the company has outstanding. So it’s two different ways to the same place.
A low P/E ratio implies that an investor buying the stock is receiving an attractive amount of value.
You’ll usually see the P/E ratio quoted two different ways:
Trailing twelve month (TTM) – which looks at the company’s actual income over the past twelve months.
Forward – This approach takes analyst estimates of earnings expectations for the upcoming year and using that as the earnings figure.
If a company is growing, its forward P/E ratio will always be smaller than its trailing twelve month P/E ratio, because more income is expected and the denominator will be larger. If you see a P/E ratio out in the wild and it isn’t specified which kind it is, you can probably assume it’s based on the company’s trailing twelve month earnings.
The P/E ratio only works if there’s an E – or earnings. So it’s a helpful tool for companies that have income, but it’s totally useless if a company isn’t currently profitable. That’s why investors also use another tool for unprofitable companies, the P/E ratio would return a negative number, which really wouldn’t be very helpful, so instead investors use the price to sales ratio.
Price-to-sales is a company’s market cap divided by its total sales over the past twelve months. Because the P/S ratio is based on revenue instead of earnings, this metric is widely used to evaluate public companies that do not have earnings because they are not yet profitable.
High growth software companies can have price-to-sales ratios of over 10, while more established businesses are usually in the mid to low single digits. The P/E and P/S ratios are great because they allow you to normalize companies of different sizes and immediately get a sense of what investors are willing to pay for a piece of that company’s earnings or revenue.
You can use these ratios to compare how a company stacks up to the overall stock market, peers in their industry, or itself relative to the past. Generally, businesses that are posting high growth rates are going to have higher price-to-earnings and price-to-sales ratios. That’s because investors expect that company to be considerably bigger in the future, and they have bid up shares to reflect that. That doesn’t mean that they’re bad stocks to own, it just means that people are expecting big growth to continue and if it doesn’t, shares could fall dramatically.
Conversely, stodgy old businesses in crawling industries tend to have lower p/e ratios because they aren’t growing very quickly – for them this year’s earnings will probably look a lot like last year’s earnings. The market isn’t expecting much from stocks with low valuations, so if the outlook gets worse, they’re less likely to take a huge hit, but they’re also less likely to give investors huge returns.
All you’re trying to do with valuation is to get a sense of how much you have to pay for a dollar of earnings or revenue from a company, and what the market expects of that company.
You can look at to see how a company’s valuation compares to the growth the company is posting. The PEG ratio accounts for the rate at which a company’s earnings are growing. It is calculated by dividing the company’s P/E ratio by its expected rate of earnings growth.
Most investors use a company’s projected rate of growth over the upcoming five years, you can use a projected growth rate for any duration of time. Using growth rate projections for shorter periods of time increases the reliability of the resulting PEG ratio.
The generally accepted rule is that a PEG ratio of 1 represents a “fair value” while anything under 1 is cheap and anything over 1 is expensive compared to the growth the company is posted.
For all these ratios there aren’t absolutes, just guidelines.
As investors we’re looking for quality companies with good business models and exciting growth prospects — it’s worth paying a premium for companies like that, these metrics help us understand what the premium looks like and how it fits into the company’s growth story.
The goal of mindfulness is to wake up to the inner workings of our mental, emotional, and physical processes.
Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us, according to the website Mindfulness.com.
Mindfulness encompasses two key ingredients: awareness and acceptance, according to Psychology Today. Awareness is the knowledge and ability to focus attention on one’s inner processes and experiences, such as the experience of the present moment. Acceptance is the ability to observe and accept—rather than judge or avoid—those streams of thought.
Whenever you bring awareness to what you’re directly experiencing via your senses, or to your state of mind via your thoughts and emotions, you’re being mindful. And there’s growing research showing that when you train your brain to be mindful, you’re actually remodeling the physical structure of your brain.
Mindfulness is a technique of deliberately focusing your attention and not let yourself be distracted by other thoughts constantly running through your head; you clear “noise” from your mind.
Mindfulness is the idea to become more self-aware. You pay attention to your thoughts, feelings, and sensations in that moment — without purposefully deciding whether they’re good or bad, and without becoming overwhelmed or overly reactive.
In short, you tune in to what you’re feeling and what’s real right now. “Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally,” says Kabat-Zinn, creator of the research-backed stress-reduction program Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) . “And then I sometimes add, in the service of self-understanding and wisdom.”
Mindfulness – Live in the day; Live in the now.
Mindfulness is available to you in every moment, whether through meditations or mindful moment practices like taking time to pause and breathe when the phone rings instead of rushing to answer it.
Breathe in and out a few times. If your mind wanders, just notice that, accept that your mind has wandered, and refocus on your breathing. That’s a bare bones example of mindfulness. “Mindfulness is really important in times like this,” says Auguste H. Fortin VI, MD, MPH, a Yale Medicine internal medicine specialist who has recommended mindfulness practices to help cope with their illnesses.
Mindfulness is a practice that involves three components:
Paying attention to what is happening in the present moment
Doing this purposely and deliberately, with resolve
Maintaining the attitude that you will stay with your mindfulness experience, whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant
As you spend time practicing mindfulness, you’ll probably find yourself feeling kinder, calmer, and more patient. These shifts in your experience are likely to generate changes in other parts of your life as well.
Mindfulness can help you maximize your enjoyment of life and help you wind down. Its benefits include lowering stress levels, reducing harmful ruminating, and protecting against depression and anxiety. Research even suggests that mindfulness can help people better cope with rejection and social isolation.
“If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.” Lao Tzu
A major factor regarding effectively managing your money and achieving financial freedom is maintaining a positive and confident mindset. Maintaining a positive growth mindset takes effort and knowledge. Here are some ways to start thinking about financial matters and building wealth:
Focus On What You Want – And Take It! So many people are too timid to admit they want something and go for it. When there is something that you want to accomplish don’t think “I could never actually do that”, think “I could do that and I WILL do that”. Play to win, not to avoid defeat.
This doesn’t mean to have to become a selfish jerk. What it means is becoming more assertive and honest with yourself. You don’t have to grab off other people. There is a big pot of unclaimed gold in the middle of the table — why shouldn’t you be the one to claim it? You deserve it!
Confront closely-held beliefs. Spend some time dissecting and understanding the previously-held beliefs you have about money. You learn a lot about money from your family at a young age—either that money is good or money is evil, for example.
Some people may grow up believing that money is a scarce resource, while others understand money as a tool. There are many numbers of qualities that get assigned to money that are not objectively true.
If you have major fear or shame regarding money, you may want to consider working through these emotions with a financial therapist. Your feelings are valid—but that doesn’t mean you have to live with them.
Integrate affirmations into your daily routine. You may find affirmations to be a grounding part of your day. For example, affirmations such as “I am worthy of wealth,” “I am capable of managing my money,” and “There is money out there to be made by me” could act as helpful reminders that you are in charge of your money and not the other way around.
To develop a positive mindset and to become a person who is “good with money”, it is essential to understand that achieving financial freedom and accumulating wealth is a journey. So, consider taking it step by step. Start by building familiarity with your financial situation, and look for small ways to improve it and make it better every day.
Don’t Spend Your Money – Invest It. The reason you need to save your money is to grow it by investing it for the long term. Millionaires tend to be frugal people, and that’s because they know the true value of money is in investing. Being your own boss goes hand-in-hand with building wealth. You’ll want to quit your regular job at some point.
Bottomline is to stop working for your money and invest, which puts your money to work for you.
Rather than buying yourself a new iPad, that $500 could be used to invest in the stock market. Find the right shares (more on that later), and that money could easily double within a year.
“The single most important factor for successful lifelong stock investing is your average holding period.” Tom Gardner, CEO and Advisor, Motley Fool
In investing, and in life, you should create and follow a comprehensive financial and investing plan. A plan helps define your money management, investing goals, and objectives while also delineating the risks associated with them. So when market hits the proverbial fan, as it inevitably will, you can revisit your plan to help provide clarity, calm and guidance to the situation. Simply put, a plan helps you navigate through both storms and sunny days; it provides balance. So the next time ominous-looking clouds begin to swirl in the horizon of the markets, check your plan, stay calm, and stay the course.
Planning to utilize a long-term financial strategy is the best way to achieve success. Finding ways to grow our money over time is a sure way to increase our financial health.
Interest rate hikes are bad for technology and growth stocks because:
Higher interest rates make materials and debt more expensive and reduce the future value of cash flows.
Higher rates also make safer assets like U.S. Treasury bills more profitable and therefore more attractive.
Long term investors have two critical advantages over Wall Street and traders: time and patience.
Time and patience are the two key edges long term investors have over most of Wall Street. And long term investors need to take every advantage of it.
Time and patience the true investor’s friends, teacher, and guardian all wrapped into one.
The single most important factor for successful long term investing is your average holding period. The primary reason why so many retail investors lose to the market’s average return: They trade too much. You are urged to hold your investments for at least five years or longer.
Pullbacks in stocks are a natural part of the ebb and flow of markets. The S&P 500 has fallen 10% on average about once per year, 15% every two years, and 20% roughly every four years. When the stock market pulls back, it sometimes throws out the baby with the bathwater, as the old saying goes. This presents savvy and patient investors with an opportunity to pick up shares of growth companies on the cheap.
And no great long-term stock that hasn’t fallen 50% at some point along the way to market-crushing returns over the long term.
With time and patience, long term investors have been able to look past short-term market pullbacks to secure long-term outstanding portfolio returns.
It can be jarring when shares tumble, especially if you’ve just started a position. But, it’s essential that you ask yourself: Has anything fundamental changed with the underlying company, or is this just market noise? If you find that fundamentals remain, you can stay the course.
Periods of significant market volatility are a great reminder to double-check that your portfolio’s asset allocation is in line with your overall risk tolerance and financial goals. Once you are confident that your portfolio has an appropriate long-term equity exposure, you can rest assured that any short-term volatility won’t be a meaningful factor. This helps investors avoid one of the most damaging of investing mistakes: making inopportune market-timing decisions.
Putting together a successful investment portfolio takes a combination of research, patience, and a little bit of risk.
Save. Invest. Hold. Repeat. As best you can, over time.
“Crystallize your goals. Make a plan for achieving them and set yourself a deadline. Then, with supreme confidence, determination and disregard for obstacles and other people’s criticisms, carry out your plan.” Paul J. Meyer
Life Coaching is focused on nurturing, advising, building and on win/win for both the coach and the recipient of the coaching. If you are a coach, you are a builder of men and women. It is a grand responsibility and opportunity! It is a chance to postively impact countless people’s lives for the better! It is a chance to become the leader and a builder of men and women you were meant to be!
In Coaching, coaches may discuss the negative thoughts and energy from their client’s in order to assist their client move forward, but they do not analyze, diagnose, or attempt to treat these behaviors or disorders. If these are observed, or concern is raised regarding these areas, the coach’s will encourage the to seek professional counseling.
In Coaching, the coach understands that the client has the answer. Thus, the coach will nudge or partner to help the client discover it. Even though the coach may have had a similar experience, they are not the client, so the coach’s solution may not work for the client. In short, the coach may share her or his experiences to show empathy with the client or to point out possibilities, but there is no premise that is the solution for the client.
Coaches work hard to be objective. Their advice is not influenced by their relationship so advice is not flavored with that in mind. Coaches know from experience and research that people who write down their goals and create an plan of action to reach those goals, are much more likely to achieve what they desire in life.
“Enter every activity without giving mental recognition to the possibility of defeat. Concentrate on your strengths, instead of your weaknesses… on your powers, instead of your problems.” Paul J. Meyer
Paul J. Meyer’s Personal Success Plan proposes you:
Crystallize your thinking. Know what you want. Determine a specific goal, and dedicate yourself to its attainment. You can’t move forward until you know what you’re moving toward.
Develop a plan for achieving your goal and a deadline for its attainment. The first step is to plan. Plan your progress carefully, in small, achievable steps that won’t overwhelm you, and choose a deadline. A time limit is a greater motivator for success than you realize.
Develop a sincere desire for the things you want in life. Develop a sincere desire for those things you want is a motivator for your activity. It’s what pushes you to do what you need to do. Focus on creating a habit of success, and doing what successful people do to have success.
Develop supreme confidence in yourself and your ability. The #1 reason that people aren’t as successful as they want to be, is because they lack confidence in themselves. Concentrate on your strengths, focus on your power. Remember what you’re good at, and focus on it. Ignore the rest.
Develop a “dogged determination” to follow through on your plan regardless of obstacles, criticism, or circumstances or what other people say, think, or do. “Construct your determination with sustained effort, controlled action, and concentrated energy. Opportunities never come to those who wait, they’re captured by those who dare to attack”, states Paul J. Meyer
“Dogged determination” can be called, “Guts, Courage, a Raw Refusal to Quit.”
90% of all failure comes from quitting. As a result, the secret to success lay in the fact that you must refuse to Quit!
Focus your confidence and desire on your strengths and power and against the mental enemies (the 5 de-motivators of… fear, doubt, worry, indecision, and negative thinking). We like to make excuses and say we can’t do it, but that’s exactly what holds us back from reaching our potential.
Pay attention to your self-talk. Are you telling yourself that you’ll be successful? Are you telling yourself that you can do it? Do you believe that you will accomplish your goals? When you can overcome that self-defeating, degrading self-talk, tremendous things will happen.
If you are experiencing negative thoughts or any negative emotions it’s usually because you are focusing on – – fear, doubt, worry, indecision and negative thinking.
Attitude is everything! Attitude is a habit of thought and a conscious choice. Who you are now is a function of specific choices that you have made and habits you’ve embraced. You are where you are and what you are because of the dominating thoughts that occupy your mind and habits that dominated your day. You have the power to change, to be, and to do anything … so use it!
They want to do business with me.
I got what it takes!
I do all things through Christ who strengthens me! Christ is my Savior and Lord of my life.
Anyone can become financially independent and free.
Coaches help clients create healthy and effective habits, not restrictions!
If building wealth and financial freedom are your destination, the journey always starts with your financial mindset, attitude and habits. Jeff Hayden
T. Harv Eker, author of “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind”, is convinced that anyone can be build wealth and become financially free. But, he opines that what holds most people back from accumulating wealth is an internal mental script or “money blueprint” that tells them that they can’t or shouldn’t.
In his bestselling book, Eker teaches people to identify their internal money blueprint and revise them. However, many critics rightfully argue that his focus on personal psychology as the sole driver of success ignores very real economic and systemic factors such as inequality, sexism and racism which can be possible determinants of one’s income bracket and net worth.
“If your subconscious “financial blueprint” is not set for success, nothing you learn, nothing you know and nothing you do will make much of a difference.” T Harv Eker
Yet, Eker argues that you have a personal wealth blueprint already ingrained in your subconscious mind that will determine your financial life and overall success. What he means is that you can know everything about saving for the future, investing to grow your money, and accumulating wealth, but if your subconscious wealth blueprint isn’t preset to a high level of life and financial success, you will never amass a large amount of wealth or achieve financial freedom.
What people have to realize is that we are all subconsciously taught and conditioned in how to deal with money and wealth, according to Eker. Unfortunately, many of us were taught by family members and acquaintances who didn’t own a lot of assets and did not have a lot of money, so their way of thinking about wealth became your natural and automatic way to think. And since you are a creature of habit, your internal thoughts and beliefs about wealth and money will determine your external results of net worth and cash flow.
“If you want to change your results, you have to start by changing your thoughts.” T. Harv Eker
Your wealth blueprint single-handedly, according to Eker, determines your financial life, because your thoughts lead to feelings, which lead to actions, which lead to your results. Thought is the ‘Mother of all Results’. It’s about a process of manifestation, that your thoughts lead to your feelings, which lead to your actions, which lead to your results.
Thoughts → Feelings → Actions → Results
The reason you think the way you do about money is conditioning. You were taught how to think about money. You weren’t born with money thoughts and beliefs. You learned them. You were conditioned around money, success, and wealth by:
Verbal programming – what you’ve heard,
Modeling – what you’ve seen,
And specific incidences and experiences you’ve had.
No personal wealth mental blueprint is true or false or right or wrong, says Eker. It’s just how you’ve been programmed. Some people are savers. Others are spenders.
There are several important question to ask yourself: What is your current wealth and success blueprint, and what results is it subconsciously moving you toward? Are you set for working hard for your money or are you set to have your money work hard for you? Are you programmed for saving money or for spending money? Are you programmed for managing your money well or mismanaging it?
Bottomline, your wealth blueprint, meaning your thoughts and beliefs, will determine ultimately your financial life and net worth – and can even determine your personal life, according to Eker.
“The vast majority of people simply do not have the internal capacity to create and hold on to large amounts of money and the increased challenges that go with more money and success. That, my friends, is the primary reason they don’t have much money.” T. Harv Eker
Six former chairs of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) — Ajit Pai, Tom Wheeler, Julius Genachowski, Michael Copps, Michael Powell and Mignon Clyburn — urged the Biden administration to resolve a dispute over the planned use of 5G wireless spectrum that the aviation industry says poses an air safety risk, according to Reuters.
Major U.S. air carriers warned that plans by wireless carriers such as AT&T and Verizon to use C-Band spectrum for 5G wireless services starting January 5, 2022, could disrupt thousands of daily flights and cost air passengers more than a billion dollars annually in delays. United Airlines Chief Executive Officer Scott Kirby warned that the 5G spectrum use “could delay, divert or cancel about 4% of daily flights and impact hundreds of thousands of passengers”.
The aviation industry and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have raised concerns about potential interference of 5G with sensitive aircraft electronics like radio altimeters. The FAA has issued directives for airlines to revise airplane and helicopter flight manuals to prohibit some operations requiring radio altimeter data when in the presence of 5G C-Band wireless broadband signals.
And, the FAA plans to issue further notices to airlines offering more detail on the potential interference and is in discussion about which altimeters could be used under the current mitigation plans.
The Biden administration wants eagerly to resolve the issue and has urged airlines to work with the wireless carriers to reach agreement. United’s Kirby has said that the FCC and FAA “need to get in a room and talk to each other and solve the problem,” adding that the issue “cannot be solved on the back of airlines.”
However, wireless carriers have shown no interest in further delays to using the spectrum. Verizon has said that “there is no evidence that 5G operations using C-band spectrum pose any risk to aviation safety, as the real-world experience in dozens of countries already using this spectrum for 5G confirms,” and added it was confident the FAA ultimately will conclude C-Band 5G use “poses no risk to air safety.”
