Today we received approval from clickbank for our product, “Beat The Medical Odds”, so we are now live on the net.  The next stage is to create traffic to our web site and hopefully sales.  Its all quite exciting.  We have made several attempts before and attempted other courses, but this course of John Thornhill is by far the best, as can be seen in the result so far.

It is also important to me that I act with integrity, that people do get value.

For eight years or so I taught and sold a couple of programs for trading options on the stock market.  But the sad fact is that only about 20% of the population should try trading options, shares, or currencies.  To be sucessful over a period of time any trader needs to master timing.  If you are the type that always turns up for an appointment on time, arrives at a destination in the car on time, no matter what the traffic was like or even if it was the first time you were going to that destination, then you have a natural timing ability and maybe you will make a sucessful trader.  If you do not have that sense of timing I would strongly advise you look to make money in other ways. Find another way of making money on the internet.

Would those on the course with me please be tolerant for a paragraph as I wax eloquently about the ease of learning with John Thornhill. Each week has been simple to follow, the instructions have been full and the amount expected of us is “do-able”. It is simply the best we have come across and I would recommend it to anyone. The only thing I would suggest to people is that they have some skill set already or some deep interest that is also an interest of lots of other people, so that you can develop product that will have a market. But even if you don’t John gives excellent training. I don’t know that I would feel quite as blase about the whole process if my wife didn’t have two products ready to go and working on a third. I am lucky that she can write for me. I do the computer stuff and she does the product.  

Many of my friends and acquaintances say they want to have an online business that can bring in some money after retirement. Some of them pay multiple thousands of dollars to be taken through the process of setting up a website and having content to put on the sites. But what we see when we hear what is going on is that the trainer is the one making the money and is setting up an ongoing income stream in the way they structure the trainee to have continuing dependency on them. One of the things I really like about John is that he sets us up to buy and manage our own site so that we are not dependent on him once this is over. Mind you the quality of what he offers is such that we’ll want to stay in touch with him as we grow in our internet expertise.

Now I won’t go into suggestions about the importance of knowing how much money you have coming in and being spent. I will assume you know about the benefits of having a budget and spending less than you have coming in. If you don’t you will very quickly find out its necessary!

Instead I’ll talk a little about the markets because for years we have been indoctrinated into the understanding that the markets keep on going up. And my wife has just been reading a book written in 1998 which assumed it was easy to find investments that would return 10% per annum on an ongoing basis.

Now what do you do if you find you don’t currently have enough money coming in? Firstly reduce expenses. Secondly look for another form of income. Oh yeah – big deal – anyone can work that out.

I’d like to make just a couple of suggestions. First beware those who are trying to suggest you can make a regular and stable income from trading stocks, options or the Forex. I’ve been trading for 12 years and taught trading for 8 years to a range of types of people, and I can tell you this: it is not as simple as those trying to get you involved would lead you to believe. Can it be done? Yes, of course. But there is a learning curve and it can be both steep and expensive. If you don’t have money to spare now is not the time to lose what little you have. That is just my opinion.

Now that I’ve suggested what not to do, what can you do? We can’t actually tell you as everyone’s situation is different, so I’ll outline a little of what we have done.

• Kept expenses right down, paying off the credit card each month
• Grow our own vegetables. We garden here on pure sand and so it takes a lot of horse manure to keep the plants fed.
• Cook all food from basic raw ingredients
• When we went vegetarian our shopping costs dropped by 40%, which rather surprised me
• Budget to keep on learning. We have set up at least 6 different websites over the last years as we have endeavoured to learn how to make money on the internet. As learning goes it isn’t horrendously expensive – tens of dollars here, a few hundred there and the occasional thousand. Compare that with the cost of going to university and it is cheap. You only need persistence. And along the way you find out which bits of internet marketing you really don’t want to do. Eventually you will stumble across a particularly good way of making money on the internet that really suits your personality. Then you go for it.
• If all else fails we intend to rent our spare rooms. We really don’t want to have to do it but we will if we must.

The problem was that when I was 20 I was not exactly open to words of wisdom from those in their 60′s who were in my eyes then, on their last legs.  Things have not changed much. However I have just realised that in my early 60s I have just entered the second half of my adult life.  If I have another 30-40 years to go then its important that I make the most of the next two decades while I still have my basic competencies.

I am very aware that although I am still reasonably active I can no longer run a 10 second 100 yeards (as it was then) and I’m aware that standing on tall ladders cleaning out the gutters is now better left to a younger person. So having raised 3 children to adulthood, supporting my wife through an extended education and having made several forays into businesses that were just an excuse to have a job with a more exacting boss (myself) I’ve decided I need to learn to leverage on all the life experience and modern technology to provide an income for the latter part of my life.

We have tried a range of on-line courses and this one with John Thornhill is by far the best. We have high hopes for the future. What we are looking at developing over the next 5 years is a range of income streams to add to my trading. So on at least one post a week I’ll expand on this theme.