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Day 1 - Wealth Building

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by Peter Switzer

Apart from not being loved, our next greatest fear is to be poor. For some of us, it’s our greatest worry but, rankings aside, no one wants to have money worries.

A couple of years ago, a post-New Year’s Eve survey found, for the first time ever, the top New Year’s resolution was “to get my money life in order”, over giving up cigarettes or losing weight!

So for the next 12 days, like the 12 days of Christmas, I will give you 12 irrefutable laws of how you get your money house in order and how you can start building wealth.

If you’re a parent, you’d hate to think your kids would be too poor to eat well, to buy a nice place to live, or to be able to bring up their own kids in comfort.

Australia’s top rating radio personality, Alan Jones, once contacted me to see if I could help a young listener called Jamie who said he had money troubles. He thought he might lose his house. He was married with two children. He and his wife had newish cars with loans against them. He had borrowed his deposit using a personal loan his dad had borrowed for him.

So, he had two loans to pay off and the personal loan on a short payback period was crippling him.

To make matters worse, he was off work with an injury and had lost his job. He was behind in his repayments and, more bad news, the value of his home was falling under the weight of rising interest rates.

He told Jones that he had never been taught anything about managing money and he wanted to learn so that he didn’t teach his own children bad money habits.

The guy didn’t expect to save his situation but was prepared to give anything a go. He simply wanted to learn how to be responsible with money so his kids would never go through what he had gone through.

Over the next 12 days, I will give you the assets I have collected over 35 years of money commentary and financial planning — the gift of how you can build wealth!

I thank Jamie for his guts and dedicate these 12 days of money lessons to him.

The Switzer Super Report is a newsletter and website for self managed super funds. With exclusive commentary from Peter Switzer and Paul Rickard the Switzer Super Report will help you maximise your after tax investment returns and grow your DIY Super. Click here for a free trial or subscribe today.

Published on: Monday, December 21, 2009