MargaretCollinsOnline – Thinking Out Loud…

Well, it’s the property extravaganza day tomorrow and we have a few spaces left.

I sooo want to be able to see The Big Issue benefit from this event that I’m sharing one more email from Judith Morgan with you…

If you can make the time or spare the donation – join us!
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It’s a Big Issue to me as a Londoner. For the last twenty years of my life, I have been aware of the homeless sleeping rough in my great city. As I go about my business I see plenty of those less fortunate that me. And you don’t know what to do for the best, do you?

I remember once calling Centre Point and asking how I could best help.

I was told not to give people on the streets money as it would simply go straight back into alcohol or drugs. I remember being surprised by how bald a statement that was.

http://www.themoneygym.com/events/property

You know me by now, I tend to think the best of people. I tend to be away with the fairies, living in a pink bubble of loveliness where we are all kind to each other and we have a warm comfy bed to sleep in at night.

And yet, of course, I know life’s not like that. That’s not reality for so many.

On Tuesday evening I met John Bird, the founder of The Big Issue. He pioneered his solution with Gordon and Anita Roddick in 1991 and it was tough love all the way. He said to the homeless “you are part of the problem, you must be part of the solution”.

They offered vendors a leg up and helped them to get started in changing their own lives through their own efforts. Selling the magazine can enable them to get back on their feet.

And if they go first, after three months the Big Issue can step in with all sorts of additional support. You haven’t begun to think what problems you can create for yourself if you don’t have a fixed abode.

Some of those were explained to us on Tuesday evening, along with the startling fact that if you have already enjoyed your 40th birthday, you have passed the average life expectancy of a homeless person.

http://www.themoneygym.com/events/property

Along with Carolyn & Neil, Karen & Rich, we went to see the Real Lives, Real Achievements awards at a laid back venue in Camden. The Big Issue has two of the most wonderful sponsors any little charity could hope for.

1. Cadbury, who not only showered us with free chocolate, but demonstrated how they give vendors two weeks’ work experience at their factories which often leads to full-time jobs. They have taken nearly 170 people off the streets in this experiment.

2. CNN who had helped The Big Issue craft five little films about real vendors and how the Big Issue has made all the difference. We will be showing a couple of those at our event on Saturday.

So what would I say to those who are critical of the way in which charities work? Yes, I know it isn’t always ideal. But TBI has only 14 staff supporting 2500 vendors across the UK. Their way of working is closely aligned with our own values at the Money Gym and I really hope that Saturday will be the first of a long and fruitful relationship us MG property folks have with helping the homeless to help themselves. Our target of £4,500 (when we reach it) is going to make a real impact, a real difference.

http://www.themoneygym.com/events/property

And it will make another dream come true too. Peter Stanley and Greg Southey and I had a number of meetings over the last couple of years trying to find a way to marry up property profits to help the homeless, it seems a natural marriage to us.

We met the awesome Sam Woodlock who is a volunteer worker with TBI, having been a homeless addict herself some time back. She is now married with a child, and happily doing great work co-ordinating Big Issue activities in Covent Garden. For me, she was perhaps the most moving story of the evening – a walking, talking success now helping others out of the place in which she had once found herself.

Not surprisingly I did shed a tear or two. Not as many as I thought because CNN did not fall into the trap of over-sentimentalising these five stories. But they are sad, and they are happy, and it is awesome to see people make a comeback from circumstances which I know I would find impossibly difficult.

There but for the grace of God.

One of the films is about a lad from Bath who wants to go on the Big Issue sponsored bike ride to Paris. He has raised part of the sponsorship money he needs to take part but at the time of making the film he had neither a bike or all the money for a Passport.

Just THINK what we take for granted!

If you can get free on Saturday and come along and support our fundraiser, that would be fab. Help yourself, help the homeless to help themselves and help us to achieve that lofty target of £4,500. Come and see the CNN films and be inspired to make a difference, if not to the homeless then to someone you can help, perhaps by becoming their landlord.

I don’t know where I would be without the sanctuary of my own home, a place where I can be safe and warm and nurtured by my peace and quiet, my garden, my pussycat, my broadband and by fulfilling relationships with family and friends and work I love.
I am so abundant and grateful and lucky.

Counting my blessings, counting my blessings, counting my blessings and hoping to pay it forward today, tomorrow, everyday and especially Saturday 21st March 2009. That day will be only the start of what we can do to help The Big Issue support the homeless in this very inspirational way.

Thanks for listening
Judith

PS If you can’t come on Saturday, you can still donate at our page: http://www.themoneygym.com/events/property

Now it’s a year since Hamsita Reardon won an award for Property Woman of the year…

See a news snippet below:

Hasmita Reardon – from homeless immigrant to 75 properties – Profit £2.9 million
Owns 75 houses and flats in Sittingbourne, Kent. Over the last 10 years, Hasmita, aged 44, has housed the homeless and single mothers whom nobody else wants. Her husband wasn’t keen but her portfolio is now worth £8.4m at a cost of £5.5m – last week she bought 5 properties. Husband Steve has now given up his day job laying driveways.

In the meantime, in spite of the credit crunch, Hamsita is expanding her property portfolio. As women continue to seek shelter and safe accommodation and are finding it more difficult to find affordable housing, they are seeking her out! This is another fantastic example of how a buy to let landlord is supporting herself and her family by providing a highly valued service to her community, this time in Sittingbourne.

Now you might still be thinking “Yes, that’s OK for her. There’s no way I could do that.” (Limiting Belief Alert!!)

Well, at the Money Gym Property Extravaganza, Hamsita is coming to share just how she did it and how she continues to make a difference. And she’s just one of many magnificent presenters Judith has lined up for us.

If you were still wondering whether it was worth paying your £25 donation to the Big Issue to gain access to this day, Hamsita is just one more reason.

Just how much does it take to convince you to come on down on 21st March and have a look – you might just learn something you like!! Have a look at http://www.themoneygym.com/events/property/ and then book a ticket for the day!

Remember…

LandlordsUrgentlyRequired

My life was brightened once more by a contribution from Judith Morgan…

MY LIVING WILL

She’s such a bitch…..

I laughed out loud!! Fortunately my friend was also attached to a computer so was too busy to pull the plug or throw the wine.

Time for a walk on the beach maybe…

Enjoy your weekend!

Wouldn’t you just love to make this headline happen?

A major charity helping the homeless, receiving financial support from a business promoting property investment…

You can make this happen.

The Money Gym is organising a Property Extravaganza and all the profits are going to the Big Issue. You can come along – buy a ticket for just £25, all profits go to charity, you gain the wisdom and experience of some of the biggest property people in the UK today.

Below is an excerpt from an email Judith Morgan wrote earlier today – and if you don’t yet know Judith, it would be worth paying £25 just for the opportunity to meet her.

Have a read and then buy the ticket…. you know we usually regret what we don’t do far more than what we choose to do… so choose today and help The Big Issue!

Judith says:
Clients ask me all the time “what makes a good property investment and do you think this one will be OK”? The short answer is usually “I don’t know”…no-one knows in advance whether any investment’s projections will come true or not, only hindsight will tell. You can do your own due diligence, you can meet others who have done it and ask them why, you can quiz them till their brains hurt but in the end you just have to make a decision – are you in or out? All I can tell you is that I was a woman who lost out big time in the last recession and that I am buying property now. And I am investing in lots of different sorts to spread my “risk” across the UK, the Caribbean and the world’s property hotspots.

Yes, you know I am as rash an entrepreneur as they come, very top line, positively relishing risk but I am learning from observing the way our property clients invest. I have two clients who invest in completely different ways. One looks at the spreadsheet and only buys if it meets her very strict criteria. One assesses the investment and uses her emotional barometer to invest. Both achieve excellent results! I think I am somewhere in between these two ladies. I like to scope out great investments for our Money Gym clients. I like a wide variety because we are all in different financial places and have more or less money and time to get started.

The wide variety of Experts I have on offer for you at our Property Extravaganza on Saturday 21st March includes:
* Someone buying for you in Manchester for very small sums – £5,000 for one or £11500 if you want to bulk buy in handfuls of five!
* Someone who will hold your hand while you learn to do it yourself so you don’t have to pay a fee next time unless you prefer to
* Someone who will show you that BMV still works – you buy better so you still put in relatively small deposits.
* Someone who will show you how to double your capital PLUS create an income within 2-6 years in the Caribbean and how that can be 100% funded
* Someone who will teach you how to use the money in your dull old pension and make investments with it via a SIPP and that this works for all our commercial property investments
* Someone who will show you how to buy houses for only £1
* And someone who will show you how to build a Unique global property portfolio where your initial capital investment is GUARANTEED.

I have 200 seats at the venue, the fabulous Cavendish Conference Centre where we were for our Brett McFall event last September. I thought I had 250 seats but the capacity turns out to be only 232 and I will need those 32 for my Money Gym team, the back of the room gang, the facilitators and mike runners and the speakers and their entourages so that’s only 200 seats available and I have sold 26 at the time of writing to the early adopters and to some new names I’ve not heard of before but I am looking forward to meeting on the day. If we sell out all 200 tickets, we will be able to donate £4347.82 to The Big Issue who are coming along on the day to collect a cheque. At the time of writing, that cheque would be for £565.21 – better than nothing but not quite what I had in mind. Will you help me to help the homeless please?

And I am having the most extraordinary luck in persuading each speaker to give me some prizes I can raffle on the day – so far this stash includes a holiday in one of the Unique properties, tickets for Harlequin’s box at Wembley so you can watch sport or music live, Rick Otton’s Cashflow Investor pack work £1997, a year’s property mentoring with me, a day out and lunch with my Property Boardroom, priceless mentoring sessions with each of our speakers, books and various other goodies. I’ve even got Martin Roberts off the telly!

Steve and I are working on this project and we are rather beside ourselves with excitement about it. I bought a book of pink raffle tickets today for £1.49 and it made me almost deliriously happy. My hallway is filling up with booty – books and chocolate money and million pound notes.

We do hope you will support the Money Gym fundraiser in aid of The Big Issue and book out 21st March in your diary and come along and learn something new, meet the Property Experts who recommend you buy in 2009 using one of their cunning schemes and help us to raise in excess of four thousand pounds for the homeless.

BUY YOUR TICKETS HERE: http://www.themoneygym.com/events/property

I’m so looking forward to seeing you there and sharing my new property secrets.

Judith

I was talking with a colleague recently about their impending Annual Appraisal Review meeting.

Almost every organisation has these reviews in some form or another and I don’t know many places where they are really appreciated or used to best effect for either employee or organisation.

It is always assumed or even explicitly stated that the purpose of such meetings is to

• provide feedback on past performance and
• encourage improvement of future performance.

Yeh… on occasion, with a really good Manager, this can feel almost true. But a good Manager is providing this feedback regularly anyway! Why would they/you wait for the annual appraisal?!

So if you’re serious about improving your personal performance, is there a good way to go about it?

How about you – Ask for feedback….

Now there’s daring! Ask your peers, ask your colleagues, ask your managers…

This might sound simple and it does require courage. However, it is very, very easy to get totally wrong!

I’ve been reading “What got you here won’t get you there” by Marshall Goldsmith – fascinating book and unusually, it’s the last few chapters that really made an impact for me.

Have you tried asking for feedback? Where do you start… “Am I doing a good job?”, “Could I be doing better?”.

People you are managing often feel the power dynamic – how can they honestly tell you what they feel could be better… it’s such an openended question and certainly not specific or focussed.

If you’re lucky, you might get someone brave enough, or arrogant enough to tell you what you’re doing wrong. It’s far more likely you will get comfirting platitudes about you’re doing a good job anyway… maybe a slightly embarrasssing smile or uncomfortable silence and then moving on with the business.

So how can you ask for feedback?

How about “I’m really serious about improving. How could I do better? Could you tell me just two things I might try?”

For some people, that would be limited enough and open enough… others might need a little time to think about it or even to share their thoughts later… no pressure…

What do you think? Would it work for you?

This article was inspired by Martin Avis who also has an excellent ebook on how to write articles. Take a look – if you like the article you might like to read the book!

Long before there was a Saint Valentine to spice things up and bring some passion into the season, mid-February was an exciting time for Roman youths. As early as 400 years BC, the Romans took part in a special competition as an act of worship to their god of shepherds, Lupercus. Teenage women had their names put into a box and drawn at random by adolescent men. The ‘winners’ then found themselves legally paired for the next twelve months. Was this a recipe for friendship, lust or love? It did seem popular though!

In the third century AD, the militaristic emperor Claudius II put a stop to marriage for young men — because he took it into his head that single men could fight harder in battle.

A Christian bishop, Valentine, didn’t agree with his Emperor and went against the law, carrying on marrying young people until Claudius found out and first imprisoned him, and finally had him brutally executed on February 14th, 270.

While he was imprisoned, Valentine fell deeply in love with the daughter of his jailer and when he was finally taken to be killed, he wrote her a note which he ended with, ‘From your Valentine.’

Valentine’s story provided a good excuse, and so, the Church, in AD 496, decided to get rid of the annual pairing off lottery run in the name of Lupercus the pagan god and so made some changes of their own to the rules of the event:

Henceforth, both the young men and the young women would randomly choose from the box, but instead of getting a year of companionship (and often lust), they drew the name of a Saint whose character they were obliged emulate over the coming twelve months.

Must have been quite a disappointment for the hot-blooded young Romans!

They named the day after Saint Valentine whose choice, 226 years after his execution, was intended more to displace the traditional god Lupercus than from any honest reverence towards love.

As so often happens, the public’s memory was stronger than new political ideology — particularly when unpopular and Saint Valentine’s name never really stopped being associated with lovers. The young Roman males, deprived of their lottery, began instead giving paper notes to the girls they fancied on February 14th.

And so, our modern love of distributing and receiving Valentines cards and messages was effectively begun over 1500 years ago!

The very first modern-day card that is still in existence is owned by the British Museum. This first proper Valentines card was sent by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife in 1415. He was a prisoner in the Tower of London at the time and so his emotions were probably quite heightened!

Five hundred years ago the Bishop of Geneva tried to reinstate the annual ‘live like a saint’ lottery, but unsurprisingly interest was low. February 14th was by then too firmly associated with lovers for the Church to successfully interfere.

In 1797 a British publisher, a man who would have done well in modern times, issued a booklet called ‘The Young Man’s Valentine Writer’ in which were hundreds of pre-written sentimental verses for the creatively challenged.

Anonymous Valentines cards not surprisingly started in Victorian times. Those outwardly straight-laced folks privately adored anything sensual and passionate, but outwardly were obliged to maintain an aura of respectful purity. As a consequence the verses in their cards became really quite filthy, but the authors remained hidden from behind their self-imposed anonymity.

The earliest known of Valentine’s cards in America, Esther Holland set a price of up to $35 for a single card. That was a fortune in 1870!

You’ve also noticed that love messages are traditionally ended with an ‘x’ – this is because in the days before people could generally read and write, it was legally acceptable for a person to draw a cross as their signature. To convey the effect of an oath, people would draw their cross and kiss it — much the same as they would kiss a Bible. Over time the hand-drawn X and the kiss became one and the same.

More recently

May you have a lovely Valentine’s day! X

This article was inspired by Martin Avis of Kickstart Daily – thanks Martin!

How much do you have?

How much do you own?

Very strange, very straight questions and very un-British! Actually I’m not really interested in the answers as much as I’m keen to get you thinking about the question.

So much of our culture is focussed on owning things, possessions, property, businesses, assets… often we are measured by what we own and those individuals who own the most are said to be rich. Maybe we are more acutely aware of this in times of recession as the gap between “haves and have-nots” increases.

To counter this it is also said that true wealth is what you have left when money is gone – someone recently made redundant may not find much comfort in this.

In my role as a Money Gym Coach, working with people, and with myself, to achieve financial freedom, these two can be seen as setting up a tension, one being there to stop you having the other.

Recent research has cast more light on this… people were asked to recall a recent purchase made, specifically a purchase made to increase their happiness.

Then they were grouped into those where the purchase was an object, a thing, a possession. A second group had made a purchase of an event, an outing and occasion.

The bottom line is that, after the purchase, people responded more joy persisted, lasted, after they had purchased an experience. The joy of possessing an object faded more rapidly.

To experience something, particularly a shared experience, a holiday, a visit to the beach with friends, the joy of shared experience persisted, was remembered, lasted.

Do have a look at the report yourself as it does have some interesting aspects, but one thing is certain –

We find most pleasure, most joy in sharing a pleasurable experience.

So now it’s official – having a good time with a friend is good for you.

So let’s do it!

I just have to share this one with you!!

How many times have you slaved making dinner while your partner sits in front of the telly waiting for food to appear?

Maybe they do shuffle into the kitchen, see you juggling pots, pans and carving knives then ask “Anything I can help with?” but get the beer from the fridge and disappear before you can answer…

I’ve been reviewing a new book “Introducing Two Cook For Two“. I really like the style and the attitude – cooking becomes a pleasure and definitely a shared activity. We might still fight over who gets to play with the salad spinner but there’s more chance that dinner will be cooked together and on time.

The book, “Introducing Two Cook For Two“, is free to download from the website www.TwoCookForTwo.com, so get over there now and get yourself a copy!

I can’t wait to make that chocolate mousse at the weekend…

I was at Bath University earlier this week delivering a workshop on Effective Communication Skills. This was targetted specifically at international students who often spend their first few months in the UK grappling with the complexities of English as spoken by the natives – and it’s not as simple as they teach in the best of language schools.

We did have a great time together. But did I have stiff competition!!

All day long it snowed. I don’t actually remember a winter like this one – they say it’s been 20 years. I know when I was much younger yes, we expected snow quite regularly. It’s been a rare novelty in more recent years. However, put yourself in the shoes of my students. The majority of them had never seen snow in their lives!!!! Bahrain, Indonesia, Malaysia… not contries known for their annual snowfall.

Every time I paused for breath their attention turned to the window. Every break we took saw an array of noses pressed against the glass as they cooed over the falling snow – and it did look like a winter wonderland.

I can be certain of one thing – we’ll be talking about the winter of 2009 for many years to come!

Why work? I’ve been listening to friends, colleagues, acquaintances talk about their jobs…

Many are re-evaluating their positions. Now this isn’t an epidemic of navel-gazing. Sure some have been shaken by insecurities arising from the global economic recession, some may be looking at contracts not being renewed. Others are experiencing the chill of a fresh blast of air as a new Director has stepped into the organisation throwing babies and bathwater down the plug-hole together or a changed job role. SOme in business are losing customers and wondering whether they can stay in business…

I’ve been listening to “reasons” why people come to work which include:

1. Money. The job pays well. Frequently we could complain that it could pay more but it covers the mortgage and the bills. It provides security if not peace.
2. The job is fun. This is usually when the job in hand is an outlet for a personal passion. The colleagues and environment also contribute to this feeling of fun. Colleagues are friends and form part of their social circle.
3. I’m learning lots. Often we know that this job is a training ground, an apprenticeship, a place to learn from the masters, to gain depth of knowledge, breadth of experience.
4. I’m making a difference! In this situation there is a mission in hand, a status quo to challenge or change, a new world to be created. People making a difference are not always big fish, sometimes hardly noticed. But that doesn’t stop them moving! They know there’s a job to be done and whether they change the world or change their neighbours or even change the way their shop-floor looks, they are going to move towards change.

I’m not promising this is an exhaustive list of reasons to go to work and the items are not mutually exclusive in any way but it did set me thinking… Reward comes in many shapes and sizes and money on it’s own rarely feeds the soul.

If you looked that those reasons in your own life and work, what order would they be?

What do you go to work for?