Rich Dad Poor Dad – Robert Kiyosaki

Archive for July, 2009

There is so much seduction to woo homeowners into making a home equity loan that buyers need to be wary. Keep your eyes and mind open before risking your most valuable asset-your home.

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Home Equity Loan – Buyer Beware

It can be demoralizing when you desperately need to request a loan while you have a bad credit rating. Nearly all businesses will decline your application, and if they do authorize, you’ll nevertheless be hampered with high interest rates. However, the good news is, this isn’t automatically the end of the line.

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Home Equity Loan For People With Bad Credit

In April and May, National Public Radio featured a series on inexpensive gourmet dishes entitled “How Low Can You Go?” Although many of the dishes looked quite tasty, most of the dishes weren’t actually all that inexpensive, often narrowly getting below $10 to feed a family of four, and many involved arduous cooking processes. I decided to try out some of these recipes throughout the summer to see how I could take the recipes and reduce them down to a simple and very inexpensive form.

I know of Ming Tsai from his excellent public television cooking show Simply Ming. He tends to make a lot of fairly unusual dishes with Asian themes that are really palatable to Western taste buds. So I was excited to try out the recipe he submitted to “How Low Can You Go,” Chicken-and-Corn Fried Rice with Lemon Spinach. Even more interesting, he claimed his kids love it, which made my foodie thoughts perk up even more. Here’s the recipe:

1 pound ground chicken
2 eggs
1 large yellow onion, minced
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon ginger powder
2 ears of corn when in season, or 1 bag frozen (12 ounces)
1/2 (10 ounces) bag spinach (washed, spun dry, de-stemmed, leaves torn)
2 tablespoons naturally brewed soy sauce
Juice of 1 lemon
4 cups cold, cooked long-grain rice, brown and white combination, preferably day-old so it’s nice and dry*
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Canola oil

Heat a wok or large saute pan over medium-high heat. Lightly coat with oil. When oil shimmers add chicken, season with salt and pepper, and brown, breaking up any large chunks with wooden spoon or spatula. Remove chicken to a plate. Add about 1/2-inch oil to wok and allow to heat; add eggs, which will puff up. Cook scrambled eggs and remove to a paper towel-lined plate. If necessary, add more oil to wok to lightly coat, then add onions, garlic, and powdered ginger, and cook until nicely caramelized, about 5 minutes. Add corn, rice, chicken and egg, and toss to combine. Add naturally brewed soy sauce, toss to combine, and check for seasoning. Place mound of raw spinach in center of four dinner plates. Drizzle with lemon juice and season. Top with fried rice to cover. Enjoy!

My wife Sarah took charge of this recipe, so my notes below are largely taken from her comments as she was making it.

First of all, here are the ingredients we used.

We wound up using Dole spinach for this because the spinach we got at the farmers market (our usual source for summer produce) was utterly abysmal – the two purveyors had some of the saddest looking spinach we’d ever seen, so we passed. The rice – a mix of white and brown long grain – was pre-cooked a day in advance. We also chose to substitute some ground turkey for the ground chicken, because that’s what we had on hand.

So, anyway, on with the cooking. She cooked the turkey with quite a bit of seasoning by itself, breaking down the pieces. Here it is, frying away on our stove:

Sarah suggests spicing the meat quite a bit here by putting on plenty of pepper and I agree wholeheartedly – black pepper really complements things well.

After the turkey was finished, she cooked the eggs, essentially making scrambled eggs in a bit of oil. This part smelled really good to me:

After the eggs were finished, she cooked the other ingredients together in the remaining oil. A quick note: she decided that there was an excess of oil after the eggs finished and removed most of the oil. I agree – I think with that much oil, there would have been too much in the pan. Half an inch might be the right amount in a wok, but not in a large pan – use just barely enough to cover the pan (once the eggs are done).

Upon adding the rice, the turkey, the eggs, and the corn to the mixture, there was a huge amount of food, filling up our rather large pan.

It smelled heavenly at this point. I (personally) suggest adding a bit more soy sauce than what the recipe calls for, but it was quite good as-is.

Serve it on top of spinach leaves, as the flavor of the spinach combines well. Here’s our final plate:

Did we like it? Almost universally, yes. Even our son, who is the pickiest eater in the house, seemed to really get into it, gobbling it down like crazy. Both children had seconds, though neither one finished their second helping. I loved it, though I would have included just a bit more soy sauce. Sarah loved it, too, though she’s intrigued as to whether it would be significantly different with chicken.

What about the cost? Our cost for this recipe totaled $9.80. But here’s the kicker – there was more left over than we consumed at the table. We were able to get eight more meals out of the fried rice, for a total of twelve meals. Thus, the cost per meal was $0.81 – not bat at all.

Still, if you’re eating for a small family and don’t want to eat this four times, you should reduce the recipe significantly.

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time
The first thing I would do is halve the recipe. The recipe makes a mountain of food and, unless you want to eat it several times or have an enormous family, it makes too much food and the rest will go to waste. One could freeze it, I suppose, but the dish does not strike me as one that would tolerate freezing well.

The second thing I’d do is reduce the oil. This doesn’t change the time, but it slightly reduces the cost and definitely improves the health of the meal. You don’t need half an inch of oil here unless you’re using a wok – even then, it’s perhaps too much.

Third, de-stemming the spinach seemed flatly unnecessary to us. It would be a time investment that doesn’t gain too much – the small stems on most spinach is just fine. We served ours just as it came, after washing.

Those changes alter the recipe quite a bit. Here’s my alteration:

1/2 pound ground chicken
1 eggs
1 small yellow onion, minced
1/2 tablespoon minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon ginger powder
1 ear of corn when in season, or 1/2 bag frozen (6 ounces)
1/4 bag spinach (washed and dried)
1 tablespoon soy sauce
Juice of 1/2 lemon
2 cups cold, cooked long-grain rice, brown and white combination, preferably day-old so it’s nice and dry (that’s about 3/8 cup of white and 3/8 cup brown when dry)
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Canola oil

Heat a wok or large saute pan over medium-high heat. Lightly coat with oil. When oil shimmers add chicken, season with salt and pepper, and brown, breaking up any large chunks with wooden spoon or spatula. Remove chicken to a plate. Add about 1/4-inch oil to wok (unless using pan, then just coat bottom) and allow to heat; add eggs, which will puff up. Cook scrambled eggs and remove to a paper towel-lined plate. If necessary, add more oil to wok to lightly coat, then add onions, garlic, and powdered ginger, and cook until nicely caramelized, about 5 minutes. Add corn, rice, chicken and egg, and toss to combine. Add naturally brewed soy sauce, toss to combine, and check for seasoning. Place mound of raw spinach in center of four dinner plates. Drizzle with lemon juice and season. Top with fried rice to cover. Enjoy!

Excerpted from:
How Low Can You Go? Chicken-and-Corn Fried Rice with Lemon Spinach

Equity Release, also known as Lifetime Mortgages can provide people of retirement age a steady sum each month. This article explains exactly what Equity Release is all about in easy to understand language.

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What You Should Know About Equity Release

With interest rates and home prices at historic lows many individuals (previously forced from the market) are now grabbing for their slice of the American Dream… the dream of home ownership. The newly announced CHF Access down payment assistance program will make this dream a reality for thousands of California residents. This program works in concert with FHA’s (203b, 234c) federally guaranteed loans which currently require only a 3.5% down payment. Qualified California applicants will now be able to secure a 15 year 2nd mortgage for 3% of the loan value (which can be utilized for down payment and/or closing costs). This down payment assistance loan is being offered at a very low rate of interest (currently 8.25%).

The rest is here:
CHF ACCESS Down Payment Assistance Program – California Home Loan For Little Or No Down Payment

A reader asked me if I could break down my ideas into a handful of principles. After some careful thought, I came up with a list of fourteen basic “rules” that summarize my money and life philosophy. I’ll be presenting these as a weekly series.

One of the first things I did when I started turning my financial situation around is to start keeping track of my net worth over time. Each week (and later each month), I calculated the value of all of my assets, all of my debts, and the difference between the two (my net worth).

Later, when I began to try to improve my physical shape, I started keeping careful track of several metrics: my weight, my resting heartbeat, and the number of miles I was walking and jogging. Even more powerful, I started sharing my walking and running data via the Nike+ website, allowing me to compare my progress with others.

I like to call it the “keeping score” effect. Almost always, it becomes more fun to work towards a difficult goal if you have some sort of method of comparing your progress to the progress of others, or comparing your current state with your state in the past. You can see the improvement clearly – when you look and see that your net worth is up $10,000 compared to last year or you see your average mile is more than a minute faster than it was a couple months ago, it feels enormous. It’s a giant rush.

The entire point here is to keep yourself motivated towards your goals. Keeping score keeps your big goals front and center in your mind. Combining that with a visual reminder of your goal can be particularly powerful, as it keeps your goal front and center in your mind and also demonstrate your progress clearly.

There are countless tools out there to help you keep track of your personal finance progress. I tend to lean towards tools like Wesabe or Open Office or Quicken, which allow you to preserve the security of your account information but require a bit more work. On the other hand, you have tools like Mint, which gathers the information for you but requires you to share all of your account information with one site (which really concerns me from a personal security standpoint, regardless of what Mint’s privacy policy says).

I find it worthwhile to carefully track my progress in four areas:

Track your assets. For me, I only include the assessed value of my home plus the balances of any investment accounts and savings accounts I have. In a normal month, I expect this amount to move up slowly over the previous month, meaning I’m actually saving money. Some months see a precipitous drop, though – for example, if I buy a car, that’s usually a pretty big money hit, since I don’t include my car as part of my assets since they depreciate so much.

Track your debts. This is key if you’re trying to plow your way through a a debt repayment plan. Each month, you record the balance of each debt, then add them up. If you’re actually pushing well on that debt repayment plan, the total balance of your debts should significantly drop each month. If you don’t see your debt dropping, you need to take a serious look at what’s going on.

Track your net worth. This one’s simple – just add up your assets and subtract all of your debts from the total. Obviously, each month, you want your net worth to be higher than the previous month. I like to make a note of the difference from month to month and I strive to increase this difference each month.

Track your spending. Whenever you spend, jot it down. Keep track of all of it and, at the end of the month, add it up. Even more important, divide that spending into categories – utilities, necessary food, eating out, entertainment, books – and total up each category. This technique is powerful because it shows you the areas where your spending is out of control and you need to tighten up.

As I mentioned earlier, when you keep track of your progress in this way, it becomes a huge aid for setting goals. Here are three ways I have used the above data to set short term goals for myself, pushing me to new heights:

I want my net worth growth to be better this month than last. Let’s say my net worth goes up $1,000 from June to July. I then want my net worth growth from July to August to be $1,001 or more. Obviously, I can’t control the growth of the stock market, but I can control my spending impulses.

I want to cut my spending in this specific category by 50% next month. If I notice that I spent more than I thought in a certain area last month – like books, for example, or on eating out – I set a goal for the next month to reduce my spending in that category by a decisive amount without jacking up my spending elsewhere.

I want my debt to drop more this month than last month. Doing this works hand in hand with my net worth goal, but in a slightly more specific way. I’ll push hard to find a few extra dollars that month to roll into a debt payment.

I’ve also found that the social aspect of such tracking and goal setting is powerful. If you like to do this online, Wesabe is an incredibly interesting and powerful tool for sharing your information and comparing it to the progress of others. You can offer encouragement to others, let them encourage you, and push towards goals together.

I’m highly partial to doing this offline, though. Find a personal finance buddy and meet together regularly to encourage each other, share your progress and your challenges, and offer useful tips to each other. For me, the reality of meeting someone face to face makes such progress tracking more real – and it also adds a stronger edge of competitiveness to the mix.

In the end, keeping track of your personal finance progress is key. It shows you quite clearly where you’ve been, how far you’ve come, and where you need to go. It helps you see the areas where you’re successful – and points out the areas where you need more work. It constantly pushes you forward to bigger and better things.

In the end, watching your steps helps you follow that trail straight to your dreams, whether it’s a financial dream or a dream in any aspect of your life.

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Rule #7: Watch Your Progress – But Make It Fun.

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