Since it is a long weekend due to the Easter holiday, for most people that usually means time off away from work/business. At the same time, a lot of people actually want to work on these days as many companies throw out incentives for people to want to work.

For example, I know one person who works for a cable company which requires around the clock customer service. To encourage people to work on holidays they are willing to pay people two to three times as much the legal requirement. Sure enough, a lot of people are more than happy to do so as a result.

When I think about it, when I was younger I used to always want to work on holidays as it was a great way to save a lot of money and not to mention the work was usually easier since it wouldn’t be that busy due to people going on vacations. Whatever works for your lifestyle I suppose.

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A person was telling me the other day that he has a pretty structured financial management plan as he always divides his funds appropriately. On top of that, he mentioned that for certain funds such as ones set aside for entertainment purposes he would force himself to spend it one way or another even if he didn’t feel like it.

He mentioned that this way he is making sure that he is constantly being active in life as oppose to always being tied down to work and money issues. I’ve seen quite a few people adopt this type of approach as well. I personally prefer to spend based in a non structured yet disciplined fashion. Would feel too much like a chore the other way for me I think.

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Recently I was debating if there was anything new for the year that I wanted to learn/do. While I am exploring my options and seeing the best ways to incorporate it into my lifestyle, in the midst of this I saw so many offerings ranging from small workshops that cost a few hundred dollars to intensive weekly program offerings that cost thousands as options to learn new things.

What this made me think of immediately was how it’s not enough to just want to learn/do something but rather you have to be prepared to make it a part of your life for it to really stick and be worthwhile. Unfortunately I don’t have a statistical source for this, but it’s almost like one of those wealth seminars or learning about finance in general. Basically, people say they want to learn something new for the better and spend hundreds of dollars learning from experts and yet more than half of the people will do nothing with it or simply forget it all in a short amount of time.

So before I invest time or money in learning new things I always question myself first whether or not I would truly be using my new found skill/knowledge throughout my daily adventures to grow as a person as oppose it being say some kind of resume item stuffer. Otherwise in most cases it just ends up as a time and money drainer I think personally and so I would avoid it. Of course this is referring to more time committing items and not smaller items.

If you invest in something for yourself then I guess it is only appropriate to expect something in return from yourself too.

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I was reading an article today where various people were surveyed on how much money they believe that they would have to save in order to be able to retire comfortably and the figure was close to $1,000,000. Unless I read it wrong, from what I gathered that didn’t account the current assets that people would have such as a house which made me think that everyone must have some pretty high standards when it comes to retirement.

I would think the average person would need about $300,000 or so to live comfortable with anything over that being more of a luxury lifestyle. While I usually try to avoid the borderline way of planning finances to avoid the just getting by mentality, one million in pure savings seems like a lot to consider as a type of necessity to retire.

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This was the final chapter in the book and of course it was titled “Think big and kick ass in business in life”. For the most part it was mostly a re-affirmation of what has been said with different stories.

One thing that I thought was odd was that there were a lot of pages near the beginning of this chapter where Trump talks about how many women he has been with as well as diving into topics such as what attracts women and so fourth. It felt completely off topic especially with lines such as “So guys, be cocky, confident, smart, and humorous and you will be able to get all the women you want”. Felt more like reading a book of “How to be a player 101”.

Although, I believe the intent in writing those parts was to demonstrate how in life attitude plays a large role on how others perceive you. He then talks about how if you are thinking big in life that you should say also own expensive and high end clothing to project to the world that you value quality.

I can easily see people interpreting that in a surface level way though which usually causes people to kill themselves financially. Speaking for myself, everyone who I have personally met who does that usually aren’t too well off financially with the ones who can speak for themselves are usually the ones who are better off financially.

The rest of it talks about having the right will, courage and determination to see things through to the end. At the same time, he emphasizes the importance of how if you want to succeed then you need to surround yourself and make friends with like-minded people as oppose to say people who are always negative and complaining to others about problems. He even says that you should discontinue contact with negative people as they will only drain you.

He then wraps it up by re-emphasizing that in the world there will always be obstacles forced upon you in your journey to success such as greedy professionals who will want to take all of your money or people who are willing to lie, cheat and steal from you. You just have to be prepared to find ways to keep going.

That does it for this book. I’ll be writing my final thoughts on it overall.

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