Military Finance - Wealth and Riches For Troops Often Seem As Far Away As the End of a Deployment
Why is it that so many service members have such a hard time building wealth, accumulating assets, and the lifestyle that they would really like to live? Well, the convenient and popular answer would be to point at the government and say that they just aren't paying our troops enough. While any pay increases for the troops are well-justified and well-deserved, that is not the answer to the financial woes that many soldiers face. Nor is frequent deployment the reason for the problem, although it is certainly a catalyst.
One part of the problem can be found in my previous blog, so I won't re-hash it here, but in a nutshell, our service members need to be trained better to spend those paychecks on the right things, and how to invest the money they have left over.
Now back to the issue of deployments and frequent changes of duty station. The military has gone to great lengths in recent years to try to stabilize military families as much as possible, but with the current state of the world we know that this just isn't entirely possible. Thus, any full-time service member, and most active Reservists can expect that they will have to move to a new home in some form or another for a period of time. Regardless of how that move is precisely characterized, the impact on finances is similar. The same is true in the civilian business world when a company moves an employee, with the exception that a promotion often comes with that move, or else the civilian employee can say "no." Members of the military don't have the option of saying "no" to a move, but they do have the option of controlling how that move impacts their finances.
As a service member you can always invest in real estate (assuming you buy at the right price in the right area) for slow sustained appreciation, and this is an investment that I would recommend for most people, but what happens when deploy is suddenly upon you? If you don't have a good trustworthy full-service property manager lined up to keep the property occupied and manage everything while you are gone, your property is going to sit vacant and just suck up more money instead of making you money.
As a service member you could put your money into ultra conservative investments like CDs and mutual funds, and these would be safe worry-free investments that would follow you anywhere, but would they build you any real wealth or teach you anything that you need to know to thrive as an independent business owner in the long run? Of course not. I would never tell someone not to have portion of their portfolio in ultra-conservative investments, but the point is that you will never get rich if that's all you do! If all goes well, and no surprises hit, you will work your job until you retire, put your 15% or whatever into a mutual fund every month, and have a small nest egg to use in your retirement.
Some people don't want to be rich, don't want to get into that top 20% tier of income and net worth, don't want to change their lifestyle, and really don't want to change anything about their life at all. That is fine if you are totally content with everything about your life, feel completely fulfilled and accomplished, and are absolutely sure that no unexpected emergency or tragedy could take it all away from you. If that's you, then my article topics probably won't interest you much. If that's not you yet, keep reading.
So what kind of investment is going to make you enough money to live the life you really want, provide far greater ROI than the billions of mutual funds that military "financial planners" try to sell you, and provide residual income through deployment and into retirement?
You need to build a business with a strong infrastructure that allows it to be managed by you and/or your partners no matter where you are in the world.
More importantly, that business must pay you residual income - this is income that you receive based on work that you did in the past, regardless of whether you are able to do any work today.
You must have the training and support to make this type of business work, and to carefully select that strong team of people who will form your worldwide infrastructure.
There's no way around it - if you are not tech savvy you will need some basic computer skill and web knowledge. You don't have to be a guru, but you do have to learn to use the Internet to make money in any 21st century business, especially any business that can move with you wherever you go. To start your own website very simply and cheaply try 1&1 hosting and be sure to pick a concise, easy-to-remember domain name.
You are going to have to buy, market, trade, broker. or sell something somewhere in your business life if you want to make real money - don't let anybody blow a smokescreen and tell you differently. If you aren't already a bona fide sales and marketing guru, you will need to have the right products/services, and be aligned with someone who can show you how to run that part of the business, especially in the ever-developing Internet world.
If you heard a lot of negative things about network marketing... so have I. But the truth is that there is a lot of potential in that industry to make incredible residual income, if you are willing to abandon the archaic methods that only work for the few and far between who happen to come into the business with the perfect combination of random factors. Those are the same people who (very convincingly) tell all newcomers that if they are motivated enough, and talk to enough people, they to can experience the same results. That may be true for a very tiny percentage who also have the right random factors aligned at that point and time in their lives. However, I would not trust my prosperity to a bunch of random factors. The point is that to make real sustainable money in network marketing, the newcomer has to have all of the 5 controllable (not random) factors that I described above.
There are countless network marketing, multi-level marketing (MLM), and home-based businesses out there that promise a steady income, but don't give you the road map to sustained residuals. In the military or any job that requires frequent moves or even business travel, sustained residual income is the what you need to keep the business booming when you can't spend your time "minding the store" (virtually speaking). Speaking of road maps, these days you need one just to find your way through all the bogus home-based business out there! Or as a better solution, you could find a guide - someone who has been there before and knows how guide you around the hazards and on to a path that works.
As an officer in the Army, I always heard jokes about how officers can't navigate or read a map, but I was Infantry enlisted before I got my commission, so this officer knows how to navigate! That's what I'm trying to do by writing these short articles. If I can help a few soldiers come off active duty with a booming business and money in the bank to show for it, then I have done my job. If I can help one corporate cube-dweller navigate out of the cube maze for good, then I have done a service. I am so incredibly tired of seeing soldiers come off active duty or back from a deployment with no money in the back, no income stream, and no appreciable skills and knowledge about how to build those assets! I am equally tired of seeing people work to make lots of money for a corporation, only to see that corporation crumble, leaving the employees with nothing to show for their work, aside from an unemployment check.
Why am I so tired of these scenarios, and so passionate about fixing the problem with those who are willing to read, listen, and learn? Because I have been in both of the scenarios I just described myself. Fortunately I had taken the time to get the education that I needed to always land a good job while I continued to search for a better way. Now, that I've navigated successfully to my objective, my mission is to share the map (complete with overlays for you military folks) with others who want to accomplish the same mission.
Michael Rakow is a frequent blogger on topics including marketing, finance, self-employment, home-based business, MLM, real estate, network marketing, and finance for military service members.
