Fundamentals of The Detroit Real Estate Apocalypse:

by: Stefan Aarnio

1) All real estate is actually worth $0, what makes it valuable is the jobs in the area.
2) Detroit has no jobs because it runs on the un-competative, bloated American auto industry that imploded a few years ago.
3) Many of the manufacturing jobs that were operating in detroit are gone because the unions have priced the labour out of the country.
4) Look at pictures of detroit 25 years ago (booming with industry) and compare them to now (Dangerous Ghost Town) vs Shenzhen China 25 years ago (Farmland) and now (Poised to become one of the leading cities in the world). All of the money and the labour have gone to the lowest bidder (aka asia).
5) Maybe it's time to get competitive with labour again and abolish the unions and minimum wage to bring international competitiveness back to America?

See the Apocalypse below:

Photos: The Ruins of Detroit Photos – Photos - PlogThe Denver Post's Plog is a collection of photo.blogs.denverpost.comUp and down Detroit’s streets, buildings stand abandoned and in ruin. French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre set out to document the decline of an American city. Their book “The Ruins of Detroit“, a document of decaying buildings frozen in time, was published in December 2010.

Making Money the Smart Way
By: Robin J. Elliott

We've heard all the cliches that are trotted out by so-called “experts” - You have to risk a lot to make a lot. You have to sacrifice your time with your family / your family. You have to be focused on one specific product or service and one specific demographic / psychographic customer model. You have to own your category on the Internet. You have to create a successful image (so lease an expensive car, pay a small fortune to graphic artists, printers, et al, lease an expensive, “impressive” office, buy a franchise, buy a business... I could go on all day.

My response to all this claptrap is, “Not necessarily.” I'm an unusual kind of entrepreneur in that I hate risk. So I run my business with no cost, no risk, no employees, no inventory, no leases, no limitations, and no cost of sales. So everything I earn is 100% profit. That's 90 – 95% of my income. The other bit is coaching and speaking engagements, both of which cost a little time, but both are designed in order to create more passive income. And I live pretty well. I don't buy stuff I don't need with money I don't have to impress people who don't care. Nobody cares how old I am, how smart I am, what my academic “qualifications” are, what experience I have, where I live, what car I drive...

Sounds too good to be true, right? I'm not talking about some Ponzi scheme, Forex, Network Marketing, real estate investing – none of that stuff. This is simple, logical, risk free, minimum time. I use Leverage, and I do that through the medium of Joint Ventures. I've been doing it for 25 years. You can do it anywhere, from anywhere, regardless of who you are, where you are, or how old you are. It takes some learning and some work in the beginning, and of course the more you learn, the more you can earn, and the faster you learn it, the faster you can create enough residual or passive income to live very comfortably indeed, with enough time to enjoy your life and the people in it.

Joint Ventures are based on the simple idea that if you bring a business more sales, they will pay you a commission – that is a part of their profits. So you can literally introduce new customers to any business that agrees to pay you a commission, and you can develop multiple income sources in different industries and in different places and countries. There is literally no limit to this concept, because it takes little time and you don't need to understand the business – just the benefit of using its products or services.

Business owners, how does this sound? I took a profit centre in my business that had taken nine months to get to $4,000 per month and boosted it to $20,000 per month in FOUR DAYS – with one, risk-free JV. If a JV Broker did that for you, would you pay him or her a percentage of that $16,000 increase every month? You would if you're smart. It's money you wouldn't have had.

How you find those customers, how you link the customers to the businesses and get paid, how you develop as a Joint Venture Broker is what I teach. And I also teach business owners to use this same principle to increase their sales and profits and only pay for results – that is commissions for sales – thereby removing risk and limitations. Less that one percent of small business owners understand and use Joint Ventures, whereas the practice is very common in large businesses. It's nothing new; it's just new to the owners of small businesses. Once you understand and use Joint Ventures, you control your income and your financial destiny. Imagine having twenty different income streams from twenty different business! That, in my opinion, is called “security.” Having a job is about as insecure as you can be.

I recently made a phone call to introduce a friend of mine who helps people get taxes back from the CRA to someone. That five minute phone call earned me a commission of $4,000. And it saved his client a LOT more. Pure profit. Win / win / win. Some people work hard to earn $4,000. Or they have to sell a lot of stuff to net $4,000. There are MANY ways to make these JV's happen. You don't have to leave your home if you don't want to. Our primary focus is real, brick and mortar businesses with real people and real money, not online JV's.

If this sounds too good to be true, check out a few testimonials on my website www.leverageadvantage.com – I have hundreds more – and objectively consider how logical this is. What I'm saying is that whether your a business owner who wants to increase your sales and profits, or you've lost your job or can't get a job, retired, a school child, just got out of prison, someone who simply wants to supplement their income, a senior, a new immigrant – it doesn't matter. Joint Ventures are a very safe and viable option. No more excuses. And it depends on how much you learn and how fast, and how much you put into making it work. And the best part? Even if one of your Joint Ventures underperforms or doesn't work at all, nobody loses any money!

Next step? Grab a free membership at www.DollarMakers.com, take a one dollar trial at www.jointventuresforlife.com or contact me direct to see if personal coaching is the way to go.

Local Winnipeg Artist, Real Estate Developer and Entrepreneur Stefan Aarnio has launched a program open to all charities in the City of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Although successful at selling his locally for profit, Mr. Aarnio's successes in Real Estate have allowed him to produce Art that is no longer commercially for sale.

All of Stefan Aarnio's current and ongoing art pieces are to be donated and sold through charities only, all proceeds collected belong 100% to the charity. Stefan Aarnio has made the decision to have all of his artistic work serve a higher purpose.

Our program has been launched with a donation to Jubilee Fund, a charity specializing in funding small, local entrepreneurs who cannot secure traditional financing.

It is our mission to serve as many charities as possible with quality, local Art pieces for fund raising purposes to serve their communities at a maximum capacity. We are always seeking charities looking for specific Art donations.

If you are a charity interested in fund raising with Stefan Aarnio's art, please contact us here.

For additional samples of Stefan Aarnio's Art work please visit stefanaarnio.com

By: Stefan Aarnio, Real Estate Investor, Serial Entrepreneur and Artist

Originally published on jamestimothywhite.com

Years, ago at the ripe young age of 22, I read the book "Rich Dad Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki for the first time and it changed my life. At the time, I was a university student studying English and Music and had no financial education. One of the most intriguing questions in the book that I have pondered for years were " what would you do with $10,000".

Kiyosaki explains that most people would consume the $10,000 and have nothing to show for it. A minority of people would be able to grow a small return on their money and a very small portion of people would be able to grow the money into infinity. At the time, I didn't understand what Robert meant by growing money into "infinity".

As a student, I was able to save up $1,000 to invest. Following the advice of the book, I began to look for an investment to grow my money in.

In 2008, as a brand new investor, I invested my money into a "High interest savings account" with a return of 2.5%. I thought I was a genius. At the time I had a much unsophisticated view of investing and went for the easiest, highest interest rate advertised.

2008 was the time of the big financial downturn and everything was on sale. I could have bought silver for $11/oz (today trading for $25-35 an ounce), I could have bought a rental property in Winnipeg (my home town) for $50,000. The same property today is selling for $150,000. I also could have bought apple stocks for $70 a share (today trading at around $600).

My financial ignorance cost me a lot of money in 2008 and since then I have made leaps and bounds in my investment career:

• With $10,000 in 2008 I would have bought a GIC (2% returns)
• With $10,000 in 2009 I bought silver and doubled my money in a year to cash out and keep the original investment. (100% annual return)
• With $10,000 in 2010 I bought small rental properties (Annual 40-75% cash on cash return plus equity over time)
• With $10,000 in 2011 I paid interest on a monster loan to build a larger cash flowing asset. (High dollar amount invested, Infinite Return over time)
• With $10,000 in 2012 I invest in my brand, my business, my education and my relationships to get infinite returns. (Low dollar amount invested, Infinite Returns over time)

The highest returns are always reserved for the most sophisticated investors and the only difference between me in 2008 and 2012 is my education, my experience and my skill set. Can you turn at $40 lunch into a $10,000, $20,000 or $25,000 return? It all depends on your education and your skills.

10 Ways to Get 10 Times More Time
by: Stefan Aarnio

Time management is an extremely important skill and always must be refined. It is spent and budgeted like money, but we are too often wasters of our own time.

1) Only read emails in batches, delete junk as it comes in, never open email without setting a next action (aka don't flag unread after reading)
2) Almost everything important can be done over the phone, this eliminates travel and waste of time texting
3) No TV period, throw it in the trash. No video games. No drugs, No alcohol, No smoking, no junk food. No unpurposeful facebooking.
4) Become results/action focused and keep daily and strategic lists. Carry in a note book at all times, revise often.
5) Create a schedule and stick to it. Practice being exactly on time for meetings and time sensitive events. Not early, not late. Exactly on time. Allow for chaos only if it is productive.
6) Journal all actions done each day at the end of the day to keep a log of what was accomplished. This can be rewarding and affirming or will reveal time killers instantly.
7) Delegate weekends to friends and family, workday hours, monday to friday 8am-Midnight for business.
8) Take action NOW. Focus on doing things immediately rather than at a later time.
9) Get 10 things accomplished before 10 am every day
10) Control your response to incoming distractions. Spot time wasting people before they rob you and avoid all together.