Well had the most amazing evening last night. I am running a wealth creation series for a West Auckland church and after our meeting we joined in a public meeting for NZ pastors. Mike Connell from Hawkes Bay was speaking and he talked about the fact that God uses our disappointments to create our destiny. Take for example someone who felt rejected as a child. That is a terrible thing to feel. However what can happen is that rejection creates a hunger for love and acceptance. When you find that love and acceptance in a healthy way, you now have a key that you can use to help others find the same love and acceptance.

I guess in a way even my situation is a little like that. My frustration over not being able to serve God due to a lack of finances caused me to seek ways to change the situation. Once I did I can now teach others how to do it. I would never have learned myself had I not been disappointed with my current situation.

So I share this with you to encourage you that no matter what you are going through or have suffered, it can be the stepping stone to your success and destiny. You need to work through the issues, face them and conquer them. But don’t give up!!

Stay Safe.
PS: We will be teaching you how to face and overcome these issues at Behind Closed Doors in 2 weeks. Love to see you there!!
PPS: I’ll be doing a video blog series starting tonight on the practical 101 steps to doing an assignment, double settlement etc. First one will load up under this blog this evening.

Well I had an amazing day yesterday attending and speaking at “Tools of the Traders” in Auckland.
I originally developed my “Advanced Trading Seminar” because no one in the country was teaching anything on trading. Since my seminars there has been some more activity in education in this area but the quality of the speakers yesterday was just incredible. It was the best stuff I’ve heard in a long time. I love it when people who are phenomenal at what they do are willing to share it with others.

And that fact that every speaker actually invested ethically and demonstrated enormous integrity, (rather than just saying they believed in it but doing the opposite as some do), was definitely the highlight for me. I feel like I’ve been instrumental in starting a revolution of trainers and educators who only teach what they are actually doing themselves, and who insist on transparency and integrity in everything they do. I look forward to my industry finally gaining a reputation for trust, truth and quality as more and more of us establish these principles.

And for you personally I pray that you will continue to pursue these life principles for yourself and support those of us out there making a stand for things we so passionately believe in.

So my heart felt thanks to Ashley Church, Roger Hardie, Tracey Hintz, Garth Melville, Kris Pedersen and Stephen Jones for a most incredible event.

First of all don’t forget to read yesterday’s blog and EMAIL me your advice. Winner will be announced at Behind Closed Doors, (you don’t have to be there to qualify).
Replies are coming in but only 2 have been in any way creative so far. So get writing!!

Anyway on to financial literacy. It seems that as the market has slowed every man and his dog is ringing or emailing me hoping I might buy their latest deal. Now I don’t mind that at all as in many cases the people think they have found a good deal and it might suit me. However the scary thing in most cases is that they don’t have enough financial information to actually have any idea whether it is a good deal or not. When the market gets harder we have to do more, not less. So trying to sell a deal to someone else when you don’t know what the RV is, or what the rental assessment is, or whether the work done on the property is legal etc., is just laziness.

I have recently made my first ever loss on a trade due to the market going a bit weird, (plus I bought emotionally ). But in this market I change what I am doing so that I stay safe. I am back to doing RV’s on virtually everything I look at, (about ten in the last week at a cost of 5 grand), and I haven’t bought any of them.

I spend more money on due diligence and expect better margins than normal because that is how you stay safe. So don’t give up and don’t look for a shortcut. When things get tough, most people bail out. This creates huge opportunity for you to get great deals by staying in the game and doing more training, going the extra mile, persevere, pursue the deals but make sure you KNOW everything about the deal before you try to pass it on.

I was reading some deals posted online today somewhere. They were around 500 to 600K buys and had some numbers for post reno or post trade profits. These deals on paper had 40 to 60K in them. In other words there was less than 10% gross margin on paper before you started. It would only take 1 tiny problem to put those deals into a major loss. I have had a client in this week who had a 60K paper profit turn into a 130K actual loss.

So don’t be lazy and don’t take unnecessary risks. Know your numbers, know your margins and if it doesn’t look like the deal of the century, pass on it!!!
This is the market to become a reluctant purchaser and a finder of exceptional deals only. Stay Safe

So here’s a first from Dean’s blogs. I’d like your advice!!

So I promised Raewyn I wouldn’t buy any more property for a bit while we sorted out our events next month.
So my main agent rings me telling me I have to buy this deal.
So I get it under contract and think well I can just assign it, I didn’t promise I wouldn’t make any money, just not buy anything.
So I order a valuation.
So the property is worth a truckload more than I paid for it, (over 20% under FAIR MARKET VALUE, let alone RV).
SO I could give it to someone.
SO I could assign it for say 5K
SO I could trade it for about 40K
SO I could keep it and add atleast 80K to my net worth

So what should I do??
Click here and tell me what YOU think I should do.

There is a prize for the best/funniest/most creative advice!!

I’m a bit “philosophical” at the moment because I am immersed in material for Behind Closed Doors and Nuts and Bolts.

One of the things I am going to be teaching is the difference between behavioural change and real change. You see most, if not all of us are taught to “behave” in a particular way. We modify our behaviour to avoid pain and find pleasure. If we got a hiding for something, (an event sadly lacking in many children’s lives today), we would modify our behaviour so that we either
A: Didn’t get caught doing it again or
B: We stopped doing it.

Now I’m sure this never happened to you but you may have had a friend who was like this .

So some of the time our parents would achieve the desired result of stopping the behaviour. However in the main we simply get more cunning at avoiding detection. This is hardly lasting change is it?

Or another example: What if you have a penchant for being light fingered. As a child it might be lollies from the shop or change out of mum’s handbag. However as you grow older and become more aware of the consequences some of us might kind of grow out of it. But most of us won’t. What we do is find more acceptable ways of stealing that still have the same adrenalin rush. The world is littered with “legitimate thieves” who rip the IRD off and feel so good about being Robin Hood.
Their behaviour modification hasn’t changed their internal attitudes 1 bit.

Many of you are probably trying to modify your behaviour to be better parents, investors, negotiators, lovers, (fill in your challenge).
Well it won’t work. Who you really are will always come out eventually, especially under stress.

Just last night on TV there was a doco about a murderer and her paedophile husband. A corrections expert was asked what the rates of re-offending were. Part of his answer was that offenders who became stressed and isolated were at the highest risk of re-offending. Why?? Well he wouldn’t know, but the answer is because prison had modified their behaviour but never ever dealt with the problem.

It would take a book to give you the answers to this question but if I am ringing your bells then join me on Saturday 10th November where we can deal with some of these issues together and become free from these chains.

I don’t want to be able to just stop doing something, I want to be able to lose the desire to do it and not fight myself all my life.

It reminds me a very old cartoon showing a schoolboy sitting at his desk after being forced to sit down by an angry teacher.
The caption underneath has the schoolboy thinking; ” I’m sitting down on the outside, but on the inside I’m standing up”. We need to be people who stand up and sit down on the inside and the outside at the same time!!

This is the sound of lights going on inside people’s brains. I’ve just gotten back from another outstanding mentoring evening with a West Auckland church and we are getting into the crunchy bits where it gets interesting. I’ve never heard so many “wows’, “are you serious’s” and “that’s clever”, all in one meeting.

It’s exciting to see what I teach actually get in, (Mrs Marsh), because it will forever change the lives of those who apply it.

Following on from my previous blog the other interesting thing is that so many of the questions people ask reveal an interesting mindset. Whenever we are making money we often assume that we are somehow being devious.

All evening people said to me “How do you get around this?” or “How do you deal with that?” There was an immediate assumption that if we were profiting out of a deal the vendor would be unhappy!

My reply was “Well I simply tell the vendors the whole truth, then you never have a problem”. This was a real revelation for many people. What started out for me as a challenge: Could I invest successfully with a focus on integrity and honesty?, has become a tool to success that beats all the grey strategies hands down.

So as I have said before I say again. You don’t have to be a prick or a liar to succeed in property. In fact I attribute my success, which most people tell me is almost unique in New Zealand, to being just the opposite.

So I hope you will consider joining me in making these principles a part of your investing. You’ll sleep well and retire young!!

So coming to you today from Raewyn’s machine as mine is again infected with a virus.
I found a great website that has professionals available to help you clean your machine. However they have warned me that my virus is so serious that my machine may be “compromised” and never safe again.

Now other than the immediate urge to hurl said machine across room this situation has caused me to think about 2 things, (well 3 actually if you include getting a mac).

1. What a sad world we have become when people make careers out of stuffing things up for others just for the fun of it. I wonder what the damage is economically to people and businesses having to sort out this stuff. The one website I joined to sort it out has 17 people working with punters just trying to get their computers going again. And multiply that by a zillion to get the world wide situation.
And the 2nd thing is that some of these trojan viruses are so clever, imagine what the writers of them could do if they chose to benefit society and themselves instead?
Rather than trying to destroy things and steal others info they could write something that would pay them legitimately for the rest of their lives. Some of them are geniuses, they are just working for the wrong team.

Now I know why people do this, it’s a little thing called sin. It entered the world through Adam and Eve in the garden and will plague us till Jesus returns but it still involves a choice. Most of you do not choose to go round destroying, lying and cheating; but some of us do.
The interesting thing about it is that it is not driven by need. It is just driven by selfishness, pride or any of a number of other sins.

I know of a very wealthy man for example who cheated on a contest recently just to win a free trip. He was caught but the whole situation was unbelievable considering who he was. In fact you wouldn’t believe me if I told you, that’s how ridiculous his behaviour was. He could have paid to go to Australia every day for the rest of his life.

So our problem is not need driven, it is sin driven. We are predisposed towards negative behaviour and this is a battle that never goes away. I believe the only answer to sin is in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He died to set us free from sin. I’ve tried it and it works. But whether you choose to look into that or ignore it you need to find a solution for the sinful temptations within yourself.

How are you going to choose to do the right thing the next time doing the wrong thing could significantly benefit you??