“I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” Michael Jordan

The simple truth is – no great success was ever achieved without failure.

Thomas Watson Jr. said, “If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.”

“Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I’ve met people who don’t want to try for fear of failing.” J.K. Rowling

Choices: It’s the little choices in life that will bite you and could kill your potential and ability to succeed. Small, seemingly insignificant, choices…made all over a long period of time is the path to success.

• Make positive choices today and have faith that in the long term (10 to 15 years) it will have significant positive impact and lead to success.
• Know your destination and get back on track. Avoid drifting off course.
• Short term pleasure creates long term pain. Short term pain creates long term pleasure. Ignore immediate gratification. Often making the poor choice, you’re rewarded immediate. If you make the positive choice, you often get nothing.
• In life, you will suffer one of two things…either the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The pain of discipline weighs ounces. The pain of regret weighs tons.
• What do successful people and unsuccessful people have in common, they both hate to do what it takes to be successful.

“The first thing to do about an obstacle is simply to stand up to it and not complain about it or whine under it but forthrightly attack it. Stand up to your obstacles and do something about them. You will find that they haven’t half the strength you think they have. Just stand up to it, that’s all, and don’t give way under it, and it will finally break. You will break it. Something has to break and it won’t be you, it will be the obstacle.” Andrew Carnegie

One Hundred Percent (100%) Responsible: Must be willing to take 100% responsibilities for our lives and relationships. And, we should expect zero percent (0%) in return. We’re responsible for:

• What We Do
• What We Don’t do
• How we Respond to What Happens to Us

When you change how you look at a situation, the situation changes. You are the lightning rod for change. You contribute to it and respond to it.

Behavior: Brain automate many processes. Must become aware of our behaviors. Dig your financial grave with your wallet. Write down every single penny that comes out of your pocket for thirty days. “Earn a lot of money and become worth a lot of money”.

• “If you want to have more, you have to become more. Success is a becoming process.” Brian Tracy
• Becoming Process: Become the person who is attractive and worthy.
• Why would you want to…know the Why.
• Start small and allow the accumulative compound effect of this new behavior to grow. Behavior repeated becomes habits.

Habits: Habits are repeated behaviors.

• Good habits are hard to develop and easy to lose. Bad habits are easy to create and hard to change.
• Changing a habit is like swimming against a strong current. Diet industry is the largest in history and we’re the most obese ever. Because, it takes will power.
• We need to have “Why” Power. Have a big enough reason why.

Massive Transformation Formula –

• What are your three big goals ( to make this the best year of your life yet)
• There are one or two key behaviors required to achieve the big three goals. Only one to three things that really matter.
• Keep Track of those key behaviors. Crucial to keep awareness to where you are. Avoid drift…the Great curse of human behavior.

Time: Give the Compound Effect time to show a difference. It is not how fast you start; it’s is how long you last. Consistency is the key. The tortoise will always defeat the hare.

Go Fail. Go fail big. Go fail often. Go fail fast. “The key to success is massive failure.” Thomas Watson. Jr.

• Life is Like a Pendulum. People want more joy, love, happiness and pleasure, and want to avoid pain, rejection, sadness and failure. But, the only side we can control is pain, rejection, sadness and failure. The pendulum will swing back in equilibrium to joy, love, happiness and pleasure.
• Must get outside my current boundaries and
• Have a love affair with failures and aggressively pursue failures.
• Only one thing holding you back…it’s fear. Must turn fear into fun. The biggest failures are always the biggest successes. You can accomplish any goal by out working and out lasting everyone else.
• Unyielding sense of resolve. I will do it or I will die. This is my mountain and I am not stopping.

Being able to build sufficient savings and income for retirement comes down to the lifestyle choices Americans make – or don’t make – today.

Americans attachment to pursuing the American Dream might be the primary reason why so many Americans have found planning and saving for retirement has become such a difficult challenge.

The American Dream includes things such as buying a big houses in the suburbs, sending kids to a prestigious college, owning multiple leased luxury vehicles in the garage, taking multiple week long destination vacations, and pursuing many other accoutrements of the prevailing American lifestyle.

This is the American Dream in a nutshell.

Popular advice espoused by financial pundits and retirement experts often worsen the problem of not being able to save what’s necessary for an emergency fund or retirement. Their recommendations to make more money, find a side gig, eliminate crushing credit card debt, save more of what you already make or, heaven forbid, cut expenditures, have not been effective.

Spending is the issue. Spending absolutely is the issue. However, small tweaks to spending don’t amount to much. Forging a mocha latte from Starbuck’s or packing one’s lunch do little to significantly alter the retirement calculation. Instead, you may need to completely rethink the spending habits, lifestyle and big-ticket material things that define what you’re doing in the big picture. Big sacrifices could have a much bigger impact on improving your retirement situation than giving up your daily latte.

It all comes down to an old adage. You can’t do the same things you’ve been doing (or only make smallish tweaks to them) and expect different results. If you’re worried about falling dangerously short in retirement, a significant lifestyle change might be what you need to get there.

Perceived short-term pain like foregoing the American Dream for long-term gain of a lifestyle of dignity in retirement.

Learn the Rules of Retirement and Then Play Better

“You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”

To put it all in simple terms, there are two things that you must do. The first thing you must do is to learn the rules of the retirement. It doesn’t sound exciting, but it’s vital. Secondly, you must commit to plan, save and invest better than anyone else. If you can do these two things, success will be yours!

Source: How The American Dream Can Crush Your Retirement
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4308423-american-dream-can-crush-retirement?ifp=0

Public support for a single-payer system has grown, according to a survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF).

Currently, a slight majority of Americans say they favor a national health plan in which all citizens would get insurance from a single government plan, though the level of support has narrowed in recent months.

Overall, a majority of Democrats and about half of independent voters favor a national Medicare-for-all plan while most Republicans oppose. Overall, a majority of Americans support the general ideal of Medicare-for-all.   Two-thirds (65%) of Americans say they support a government-run health plan that would compete with private insurance, often called a public option.

Medicare is the federal health insurance program created in 1965 for people ages 65 and over, regardless of income, medical history, or health status. The program was expanded in 1972 to cover certain people under age 65 who have a long-term disability. Today, Medicare plays a key role in providing health and financial security to 60 million older people and younger people with disabilities.

Medicare-for-all plan will require many employers and some individuals to pay more in taxes while eliminating both out-of-pocket costs and premiums for all Americans. And, the plan will increase taxes individuals will personally pay, but decrease their overall costs for health care.

KFF polling finds that Americans know little about how Medicare-for-all proposals would reshape the way all Americans get and pay for health care, and public support for Medicare-for-all shifts significantly when people hear arguments about potential tax increases or delays in medical tests and treatment.

Additionally, KFF polling shows many Americans falsely assume they would be able to keep their current employer provided private health insurance under a single-payer plan, suggesting another potential area for decreased support.

Medicare, in its current form, faces a number of critical issues and challenges, perhaps none greater than providing affordable, quality care to an aging population while keeping the program financially secure for future generations.  Medicare is financed by general revenues (41% in 2017), payroll tax contributions (37%), beneficiary premiums (14%), and other sources.

Two-thirds (65%) say they support a government-run health plan that would compete with private insurance, often called a public option.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

One simple financial question to ask yourself and colleagues:

“If you had a choice, would you rather receive $200,000 cash or a penny that doubles in value every day?”

Not surprisingly, most people choose the $200,000.  It is the bird in the hand concept.

But in reality, the magical penny would actually leave individuals much better off. Due to the magic of compound interest, a penny that doubles in value every day would be worth more than $10 million after only a month!

The compound interest equation which follows applies:

FV = PV(1+r)ⁿ, where FV is future value, PV is present value, r is the interest rate per period, and n is the number of compounding periods.

Compounding is the effect where an investment earns interest not only on the principal component but also gives interest on interest. So compounding is basically interest on interest. When we say that the investment will be compounded daily, it means that we will earn interest on the daily interest along with the principal.

The concept is such that it assumes that the interest earned every day is reinvested at the same rate and will get increased as the time passes.

The carried interest loophole is just one of many ways the U.S. tax code offers preferential treatment to some Americans.

The U.S. tax code treats earned income from labor and investment income from dividends and capital gains differently.

If you are paid for performing a service (such as managing a company), your compensation is subject to ordinary income tax rates.

If you make an investment (such as buying the stock of a company), any profits you earn when selling that stock are subject to the lower capital gains tax rates.

Carried interest loophole allows people who manage investment funds, such as private equity funds and hedge funds managers, convert their compensation as if it were into lower-taxed capital gains, when it is actually derived from the labor and skill involved in managing other people’s investments.

Essentially, the partners in businesses that manage pools of money on behalf of investors are paid in two ways. One part of their income is a “management fee” for managing the investments. This fee is generally taxed as ordinary income.  The other part of the fund managers’ income is their cut of the fund’s profits. The fund managers treat their part of the fund’s earnings as a capital gain, subject only to the lower-taxed capital gains tax rate.

Investment managers typically take a management fee equal to just 2 percent of the assets they manage—plus a 20 percent cut of their investors’ profits. In doing so, they are able to shield the bulk of their income from ordinary tax rates.  As a result, theses wealthy fund managers have experienced disproportionately large income and wealth growth compared to everyone else.

Source:  Seth Hanlon and Gadi Dechter, “Congress Should Close the Carried Interest Loophole”, (Washington:  Center for American Progress, posted December 18, 2012), available at  https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/news/2012/12/18/48469/congress-should-close-the-carried-interest-loophole/