So What’s Your Net Worth?

These people cannot be millionaires! They don’t look like millionaires, they don’t dress like millionaires, they don’t eat like millionaires, they don’t act like millionaires – they don’t even have millionaire names. Where are the millionaires who look like millionaires?

I am currently reading this book by Thomas Stanley and William Danko.

This book mainly started as they had discovered something odd about who the real wealthy people are. They were initially set to know how people become wealthy so they basically started out with the most obvious thing to do: they visited and conducted survey in the so called posh and upscale neighbourhoods across the country but interestingly, they got the most shocking discovery of their lives.

People living in these upscale neighbourhoods and driving luxury cars do not have much wealth while many of the people who have lot of wealth do not even live in this neighbourhoods!

They have discovered that most of the millionaires do not look like millionaires at all and are living below their means while those people who are just above broke (JOB) are usually the ones who are spending more than what they can afford.

I have not gone far just yet but the book is an easy read so far. I also encountered something interesting that a lot of you might be interested to know. And it is knowing your supposed net worth given your monthly income and age.

You can get what your net worth should be using this formula:

And using the answer from this, you can now then identify if you are a PAW (Prodigious Accumulator of Wealth) or a UAW (Under Accumulator of Wealth).

PAW = you are immediately classified here if you have a net worth more than twice of your supposed net worth.

UAW = you are considered as this if you have a net worth less than half of your supposed net worth.

You may ask, what if I only have a net worth almost the same as my supposed net worth?

Then you are just an AAW (Average Accumulator of Wealth)

Basically, what the book says so far is that being wealthy is relative. We have this twisted perception that if a person has already a million as his net worth, then he is already considered to be wealthy. But that is not always the case. A millionaire can still be considered not wealthy. We should remember that having a million could not be used as a direct determinant of being wealthy.

So, what are you? =)

DUH!?

I braved the scorching heat earlier to buy a ream of bond paper in the nearby school supplies store. It's just a 5-minute walk from our place so it's no big deal really. It is just fascinating for me to hear that my exercise-deprived self braved through something today even though I am only exaggerating what had really transpired. Anyway, I arrived in the store with a thousand pesos in hand, which I think is more than enough for what I was about to buy.

I am always on a lookout for good books to read but this time I was actually resisting the temptation to buy a book or two for I think that these will only add up eventually in my stack of unread books but lo and behold! I walked out of the store towing a large translucent plastic bag with a ream of bond paper and a book inside it.

Well actually what I said is not true in its entirety. I was just reading earlier this day Francis Kong's blog and I chanced upon an entry about his new book that just came out a couple of months ago. I walked up in the store secretly hoping that I will walk out of it with his new book. All of his books that I have read so far did not fail to motivate me so it is a no-brainer that I got to have it sooner or later, if not now.

I was having a bad day earlier that getting hold of a good book, having torn down the plastic that had been sealing the handful of Mr Kong’s wise tidbits, whiffing in the scent of the newly bought book and eventually reading the fine prints embossed on those white pages immediately lighten up my mood. I had only tackled so far the chapter on career. Below are fragments of his writings that had struck my sensibility so far.

• You will always be paid in direct proportion to what you do, how well you do it, and the difficulty of replacing you. - Brian Tracy (I always believe in this, much like Steve Pavlina's view that the greater the thing that you had done for the society, the greater the return will be. It will never be left unpaid, there's always a corresponding something that will compensate what you have done.)

• The trying should not be rewarded. You have to make sure that you reward end results more than anything else. (Knocked out! Good intention is never enough, you should act it out, you should arrive at something remarkable to say that you had done something remarkable. Trying is not doing at all. Most of us use the process of trying just to mask up that want to detach ourselves from the task at hand and to 'gracefully' escape from our true responsibility without actually looking like we are trying to get out of it. This act is shameful since it will eventually emanate from us that we are not up to giving our full heart to what we are doing. That all the busyness is a mere facade.)

• Pay attention. (I am a sucker when it comes to this since my mind is most of the time wandering. The impatience and wandering mind robs us out of the moment,which in turn makes us lose sight of the beauty the things around us has to offer at that given instance. Paying full attention is the true embodiment of both listening with your heart, not with your head since listening with your head is more of an egotistical approach than a genuine one, and being completely present in the now.)