Cashflow - 101 and 202 Fast Track

Once you are out on the 'Fast Track', life's a breeze. Provided you land on green squares and buy all those businesses, you'll soon get the extra $50,000 cashflow required to win the game - it's just a matter of time. You tend to just coast along when other players in the Rat Race struggle.

This is an analogy with real life, as you have made it to the 'big time' and don't need to worry about money anymore.

In most cases, you'll have more cash than you know what to do with! -
Even if you spend it all, you'll get loads more when you next pass a yellow 'Cashflow Day' square.

Things do get more interesting in the 202 game though. Now if somebody lands on your business, they can buy it from you and you lose the business and the cashflow. So there will be a downside to your game.

Also, you can franchise your business if you land on it more than once, getting even more cashflow income. However, if another player wants to buy your franchise, they need a lot of money to do this, so in the 101 game, cash is plentiful on the Fast Track, but it is quickly spent in the 202 Fast Track game.

Another Passive Income Stream

I've just published another ebook. It's about being aboard a cruiseship and the sort of things that go on to make up a regular cruise. A good helping of detail, especially if you don't know anything at all about cruises. Check it out here

I say 'published', but these days it's just a case of uploading the words of your book to a site like Amazon Kindle to get on their website. They take their cut, and you sell your book, especially if it has a review or two.

It's part of an attempt to get a few ebooks out there (with good content) to increase my passive income streams, even if only by a tiny amount.

Article - Cruising for the first time?

I only write on stuff that I am knowledgeable about, as content is key to selling any ebook.

Thinking Differently About Earning Money

'Work' is swapping your time for money.

The fundamental way of earning money, used by most people (especially in Westernised society), is to have a job where you exchange your time for a fixed wage. What this basically means is that an hour of your time is exchanged for an hours worth of wages. Most people are familiar with this concept.

Each week you will work say 40 hours, so you can confidently calculate how much you earn each week.

The problem is that there is a fixed amount of time that you can work per week, so ultimately, there is a limit to how much you can earn.

Another way to earn money is passively. What this means is that you earn money 24 hours per day 7 days per week without using up any of your time.

What tends to happen, is that you have to 'work' initially, to set up the passive income 'model', and then it just runs by itself earning money without you 'working' for it.

This work that you put in initially may be in the form of writing a book, or recording your new song. Once you have finished the initial creation, it can then earn money for you, passively.

A big part of the passive income idea is that you do not know and cannot guarantee how much you will earn from it. So you cannot rely on the passive income to pay the bills. One week, nobody will buy your book or your song and you will therefore have no income. Most people are not happy with this uncertainty, especially when the bills have to be paid!

So you need to think differently. The first step is to realise that you can earn money in ways other than a job.

Winning The Cashflow Game

Just a few hints and tips to enable you to get better at playing the 'Cashflow' Game.

A lot of us don't pay off our debts in real life and the same occurs in Cashflow. By paying off these debts, you can reduce your expenses and therefore increase your income and cashflow.

                                    

Other advice is to always take opportunities in Cashflow whenever you can. Also, don't leave your money lying around doing nothing - This will surely lose you the game!

Cashflow opportunity or not?

There are a couple of cards in the 'Small Deals' pack of Cashflow that offer sale of property with negative cashflow.

Your initial reaction is see the negative cashflow figure and move on.

In actuality, you (or someone else) will soon pick up a 'Market' card, allowing you to sell property at a rate that is always worth considering, for quick cash profit.

I suppose the overriding message here is to consider all opportunities you come across, even if they initially appear disadvantageous - in Cashflow, and in real life...

Another eBook?

I'm deciding whether to write another eBook - Yawn!

When you say that you are about to write another eBook, most of your friends and contemporaries may ignore you and change the subject quickly to 'X Factor', or the latest football match.

The word 'eBook' sounds like a cheap version of the real thing, so you tend to switch off (a bit).

It also conjures up (for those who have bought them) a low cost, thin 'book', which, when translated to pages on your Kindle screen, amounts to an hour or so of reading stuff you already know.

This may be the case for a lot of the eBooks out there, but there are also the minority of good ones, which tend to be information rich and enable you to absorb and learn stuff easily and quickly.

These days, people want to be able to be informed quickly and the eBook is the answer.

The pleasure from seeing your eBook sell is well worth the effort and this adds to your aim of increasing your passive income remember?

Doodads

Don't really know where 'Doodad' comes from but the definition is that it is an unamed gadget or thing.

In Cashflow, this refers to anything that you spend money on without thinking about it too much. A cup of coffee or lunch with friends.

The pretty much guaranteed process of picking up a 'Doodad' card means that you will part with some of your money and never see any return on it at all. In Cashflow this is bad, as you want to make your money work for you as much as possible.

More pricier Doodads may be spending money on a new Hi-Fi system, or taking the kids out for the day.

In the 101 game, the Doodad to avoid is the 'Boat' Card, whch is not only expensive ($1000 down and $17,000 on time) because it adds $340 to your expenses, to pay for the $17,000 loan for the boat.

So in most cases, picking up the Doodad card is a 'necessary' drain on your money, or even a money pit if you happen to do it often.

In the 202 game, the Doodad's are more 'involved' and that usually includes adding a regular bill to your monthly expenses (see the illustration above!)

There is no strategy with Doodads, as they are entirely due to the roll of the dice, so you cannot avoid them.

Just be aware that you will pick up a Doodad card a few times during any game and that you'll need some cash to pay for it, so have some set aside would be a good policy.

Videos on YouTube increase that passive income stream

A friend of mine is making lots of 'review' videos and piling them onto YouTube at the moment.

He has learnt that even if you only make a few pence a day from 5 videos, then 10 can only make you more!

There is also the bonus of striking it lucky and making a video on a niche subject that a lot of people want to watch. I suppose it's a bit like Premium Bonds in that you can get small prizes quite regularly (if you have the maximum holding of £30,000), but still have that opportunity of winning that big one.

Videos are so easy to make with a smartphone or ipod touch and there is usually the facility to upload your video to YouTube from your device in an instant at the touch of a button!

When your video is up on YouTube, you then have an online editor to add captions, music and merge several videos into one! This is the sort of thing that you would only dream of a few years ago...

Anyway, the constant creation of good content, reviewing something with a video is one sure way of increasing your passive income.

Land and Gold Opportunities require patience in Cashflow

I suppose this is an important lesson in building up your investment portfolio and increasing your passive income. Be patient, the opportunity will eventually come up!

In the Cashflow Game, there are many opportunities to make money that a lot of players miss. The idea is that you pick up a Small or Big deal card that allows you to buy land, gold coins or a limited partnership.

You or somebody else can then pick up a Market card to sell these at a profit. The thing is that there are only a few of these cards in the pack and the opportunity doesn't come up that often to buy or sell them.

As you should know, you must always use every opportunity you can in Cashflow, no matter how small, to boost you income, so investing in gold, land or limited partnerships is a longer term play for your returns, which may only double your money invested.

Don't just discard the opportunity, give it a go!

Win Cashflow Easily ...and quickly!

I really wonder how far you can 'use' the $1 card (There are two of them) in the game of Cashflow.

I managed to pick up the card in my last game and promptly got a bank loan for $10,000 to pay for 10,000 shares. Doesn't everybody do this sort of thing? (I can also see that this is not a sound thing to do with real life investing!).

I just wondered how far you could go. With any number of people playing, provided that they are still in the 'Rat Race', it is quite likely that another MYT4U card will come up soon, and it will almost certainly have a greater 'Today's Price' than $1.

You will then sell your MYT4U shares and profit greatly, ensuring that when you next land on 'Small' or 'Big Deals', you can always go for 'Big Deals' and greatly improve your cashflow rather quickly as nothing will be too expensive for you to buy as you will have lots of Dollars.

I would probably risk using up all my monthly cashflow buying these shares, just for the small risk of waiting a few goes, until another MYT4U card comes up.

Can the game be really this simple to win?