Money messages – your earliest memories about money, often passed down by your parents – influence your financial perspective in an extremely powerful way. For instance, one of my clients has a strong memory of his father putting change in a huge container in the living room every evening, explaining that when it was full, they’d be able to go on a vacation… and teaching the value of saving for a goal. This client uses the same tactic with his kids, tweaking it slightly so they realize that when their containers are full, they can exchange the coins for bills.

Those who were raised to believe that money equates to power, freedom and control are going to behave much differently than those who were taught that money isn’t a good thing. Among the money messages some people learned as a child are:

• You have to work hard and suffer to earn money.
• Having a lot of money isn’t “spiritual.”
• Money is too hard to manage.
• You’ll never be rich.

If you were brought up with these beliefs, you can actually sabotage yourself as an adult with respect to making financial decisions. Your upbringing will also have a lot

Level I – Handle all bad debt

Bad debt is distinguished by it being used for consumption rather than production. Bad debt typically does not have beneficial tax treatment like good debt does. By getting rid of all bad debt, you’ve established you can budget and you can produce more than you consume. These habits are critical to achieve financial success. In addition, these habits must be learned before anything else can be accomplished.

Level II – Start a Retirement Account and add 10% per year

Retirement is the first goal you should tackle after handling your bad debt because you want to add small amounts of money over a long period of time. You need your money to have a chance to compound over time. So, you need to start a retirement account as early as you can, preferably in your 20’s. I like the automatic investing approach provided by “robo-advisors” such as Wealthfront, Betterment and Personal Capital. The earlier you start, the more time your money has to compound and the easier it will be to retire with enough money.

Level III – Create a Savings Account with three months of expenses

Farming has changed from when I was a kid, 60 years ago, growing up on the outskirts of rural Joliet and Kankakee Illinois. Then, many small-time farmers could support their families with a 160-320 acre farm and a part-time job during the winter. Today, farms are huge enterprises and some of the folks I met farm 3,000-10,000 acres. Machinery is costly, with combines costing $300,000 or more. So, one needs a lot of acres to amortize the high cost of machinery.

In the past 5 years, there have been record crop prices, reaching as high as $7 per bushel corn; $16 per bushel soybeans; and $10 per bushel wheat. With high crop prices and large farms operated, net profit form farming is no longer small potatoes. A number of the farmers have net profits of $250,000 to $1,500,000 in a good year. So, they now have more cashflow than ever and therefore tax problems. They also have the cash to do things for the family that were previously unheard of. Let me cover their concerns as well as advanced strategies that are solutions:

I have big profits and want to save income tax: Earlier in 2013,

Seller Pitfalls

The seller usually assumes that once they receive the funds associated with the transaction, they do not need to worry anymore. This is correct as long as the bill of sale is proper and contains an odometer disclosure form. The odometer disclosure form specifics the number mileage on the vehicle the date the ownership is transferred to the seller. This is important down the line in many scenarios that include:

• The buyer in turn sells the vehicle and alters the mileage on the car in order to obtain a higher price. The new buyer discovers that the mileage was altered and reports the fraud. Without the odometer disclosure form, it is very hard to ascertain if the fraud was committed by the original owner or the second owner. Therefore, a proper bill of sale would ensure the original owner is free from any unforeseen developments.
• The buyer alters the odometer reading in order get repairs under warranty. As outlined above, again it is almost very difficult to determine who committed the fraud. The last thing the original owner wants is to be liable for something they did not do.

Additionally, a proper

NO PARKING

You have been guilty of procrastinating on the steps in your goal plan. You write to-do lists for all your unfinished tasks, but never seem to get around to carrying them out. You keep resetting the timeline on your goal end date, making excuses why you have not moved further along.

The ‘No Parking’ sign admonishes you for wasting precious time when you should be working on your objectives. Stop deceiving yourself; your laziness is only going to kill your dreams. Revive yourself from your stupor, rev up your engine, and restart your journey immediately.

INTERSECTION AHEAD

You have been travelling easily along a straight road, as the first steps in your action plan were simple and uncomplicated. However, you have reached a new point in your journey where you need to make a big decision that could determine the ultimate failure or success of your plans.

The ‘Intersection Ahead’ sign indicates that you need to take some time to make prudent choices about your next actions. You may need to seek guidance from expert sources, or carry out additional research to obtain all the information required to decide which way