randall pena

Triggered by a recent experience, I'd like to share this old fable about "The Devil's Best Tool". The devil is going out of business and he is selling all the tools of his trade. The night of the sale, all the tools were attractively displayed luring every dark hearted fellow that passes by. On the window display are the hammer of hatred, the scythe of spite, the maul of malice, and the dagger of deceit. As one would expect, the Devil's tools are all ominous, but there's this one seemingly innocent item expensively priced among the rest. When a passer by asked why is it so expensive, the Devil slowly smiles and said, "To be totally honest, this is my most powerful weapon of all. I call it the wedge of doubt. When all my other tools fails me, I know I can always rely on doubt and discouragement to break the heart and shatter the will of man. It goes undetected and with it I can make him do what I want"

How upsetting that something so small and often ignored can be so devastating. Doubt and fear are the wedge that separates us from our dreams, simply the moral of this fable is quite clear: Never let doubt and fear get in your way, specially when you're certain of what you want. Be it earning a living on something that you really love doing, investing to slowly achieve financial freedom or asking your long time crush out for a date.

Do not doubt your abilities or the possibilities.

Relating it to investing, many people simply don't believe they can really be investors or that investing can help them reach financial freedom. As in my case, I didn't initially realize that fear and doubt is at play in my financial life and overall happiness. Few years ago, though I acknowledge the value of investing I feel that it is complicated, too risky, beyond my reach or know how. Only when I am pressed with questions like "Why don't you do this or that?" do I realize that a powerful wedge is standing between me and my dreams, that great opportunities and possibilities can be found outside the circle my safe comfort zone.

When you know what you want, go for it and never look back.

Many investors get their start with the help of a mentor, an experienced advisor who may say only a few words, but words with the power to push a novice in a new, life-changing direction. That's what happened to me 3 years ago when a wise mentor shared with me the "bucket theory" that set me on track in pursuing financial independence (I haven't arrived yet, I'm still pursuing).

The theory is this: Everyone has control over three financial "buckets." The first bucket takes care of family obligations; it's the baseline with which you take care of your home, your health, your children's education, and other day-to-day necessities and monthly expenses of life. Once that bucket is full, you can start filling the second bucket: long-term investments. That bucket isn't full until it generates enough income to take care of all the needs of bucket 1 with passive income.

"Then, after you've filled buckets 1 and 2, you've earned the right to play and have toys. That's bucket 3," says the mentor. "The problem is that people start backward, and because they start with the play bucket, they aren't able to fill bucket 2 and create substantial wealth by investing."

First of all, I'd like to greet everyone a happy and prosperous new year.

This year I've just set a ridiculous goal for me and my family, our group calls this "Faith Goals", wherein we allow faith to God to set in to achieve it (I'll share more of this on my succeeding posts).  Since I'll be heavily investing most of my time, energy and money in studying real estate and social media tools. It would be natural to find out people's interest on that subject matter. 

Google trend is a good tool for analyzing global search volume on particular keywords. Using the keyword "philippine real estate", I got the following trend. Without going too technical on exact meaning of the figures, simple interpretation is  that people's interest on Philippine real estate has significantly increased on the 3rd quarter of 2009. 

Are you ready to dream big and live life to its fullest? Real learning begins only when the person is open and willing. I am a life long student and I love to share what I have learned. I devour on books and whenever I get my hands on good books, it ends up looking like a drawing and coloring book, pages are filled with pencil notes and important points highlighted with different colors. The same mess happened to the book you are seeing right now.  

This book served me well, it's my hand book for real estate investing. After reading it I was so convinced that it is very feasible for anyone to passively earn millions in real estate and I mean ANYONE. If I haven't stumbled upon this book it would have probably not been feasible for me to acquire 2 real property wherein one is already earning me passive income. Creating financial wealth begins with an understanding of the best and time-tested principles for making and managing money. Having knowledge of what is a good deal and a great deal is also very important. The lack of it could either cripple you or totally knock you out of the game. But don't worry, real estate investing is not rocket science, the tools and methods are easy to use, just like playing Monopoly board game wherein you have full control of the dice.

After reading it you'll feel liberated, you'll realize what's possible for you and start achieving it.

It is so feasible to become millionaire in real estate, anyone can do it... not everyone will... the question is... will you?

 

While I was busy, on a lot of things aside working, the way how the internet and web connects people is changing. Five years ago Friendster for me is the most sociable thing that ever happened on the web. Imagine a friend can post testimonials about how cool you are and such a nice person. But thinking about it now, I know the expression I would get from you is this :| (a straight face). But you have to admit it, it's really a huge thing back then.

Then multinational companies begins to see these social tools as counter productive, so they blocked them off from their network using enterprise class web filtering software. A huge number of workforce (including me) was locked in, while the outside world are connecting and enjoying the evolution of social media, I was locked in, busy, working. Everyone else has a Facebook and Twitter account and I didn't bothered having one cause I also think these are time wasters.

Until a month ago I opened a Facebook account, for the single purpose of selling something. I know it's kinda self serving, but that's how I got hooked. The more I connect to people, the more I see its value. A decade ago, its all about how good you are and how much you know. Now its about to what extent are you connected to everyone and how much have you shared of what you know.

This website that I have will be my means of sharing what I know about web 2.0, social media and web technologies. Having experience on web programming help me do almost anything I want on my website, such as broadcasting this blog post to all social media networks (facebook, twitter, linkedin, myspace, multiply, AIM, skype, etc.) in REAL TIME as I hit the publish button of my favorite CMS (Drupal). Cool huh?! We'll that will be another story and I'll share it on my next blog post. Hopefully on my next post, I'll be able to share something useful. For now I'd like to test if this will get posted on my FB, twitter and linkedin account. Here goes nothing... < click! >

I'm no longer enjoying the weather specially when I found out the flood already rushed in to some of my friends house. Prayer request po for all the people affected by the typhoon specially those living in flood prone areas, so they may be all safe. Thanks!

Love the weather, its raining hard outside. It's nice to stay at home, read books, surf the net and just fiddle around with Drupal. I was thinking to integrate my personal site with twitter and have my tweets displayed on the side bar.

Before attempting to learn twitter API, I thought checking first the Drupal site for any existing contributed modules, and I wasn't quite surprised when I saw one (twitter module for Drupal). Twitter is too popular to be missed out by Drupal Community. I'll go get it for a test drive.

I'm definitely sure there are modules for Facebook and LinkedIn. If there's none, then I'll just probably get my hands dirty on their API's.