RUN YOUR LIFE LIKE A BUSINESS!
RUN YOUR LIFE LIKE A BUSINESS!I’ve heard a lot about running your life as business. But let me tell you a story.I had a Bishop in the LDS Church that help with this quite a bit when we had some difficulties both financially, medically and with the government. And he told me the only way that I would get ahead, because of the complex of the of my life, was to run it like a business.
Please understand that a information in this report is my opinion and I cannot guarantee what kind of results that will bring you or if it will even help you. Do your own research and make your own decisions.
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I did a lot of looking that thinking about it and I’ll be honest about it, I did a lot of ignoring. Here were some of the things that we had, that needed to be changed.
· We did not have a decent budget
· We spent money when we had it in the bank.
· We had a lot of credit card debt and the problem with this was we didn’t know where the money went.
· My wife and I were both working and we had five children.
· We had filed bankruptcy a couple of years before.
· We were paying off the bankruptcy at a cost of 8% for the bankruptcy and then the interest to the creditors.
With all of that setting on our heads we needed to find a way to organize our life.
At about that time a piece of property came up for sale that we wanted to buy and live on. Somehow or other I talked the seller into selling us the property and carrying the contract at 6% interest. We bought the property and it had a small house on it which we rented to one of our grown daughters.
It was about this time that I realized I had to organize my finances. This was about 1995 or something like that and between my wife and I were making well over $100,000 a year. But we had nothing to show for it. I ignored the problem for a while longer and figured out a way to refinance it and put a house on the property.
This we did and almost lost everything because of a lady who worked for Benton County and was an inspector for the septic systems. We had a a good plan for septic system laid out and ready to put it in. She said you can not put that septic tank there, with no reason at all, you got to put it over here. Well we reorganize the plan. Put the septic tank over there and she again expected she said no. I can’t approve that. While the septic system met all the requirements of the that time, and those she had established before, however they were not written down.
This really scared me and pissed me off. I contacted all the other counties in the area and got their requirements. They got back to the head of the Health Department Benton County and wanted to know why I was asking for all that information. The head of the health department called me to understand what was going on and I told my story. He came and looked at the septic system then he start asked me questions. The question that really got some answers was why did I contact all the other health departments in the area.
My answer was, “ I’m getting ready to sue you guys for about $10 million.”
That was a figure that just popped in my mind and I had not even contacted a lawyer yet. He looked at one more time and and said “That’s suspicious, I don’t see a thing wrong with this, here’s a paper signed off”.
We got that house on the property and everything taken care of. I build a new shop and had about a quarter million dollars worth of tools and equipment sitting out there including a lot of farm equipment and so on as the land was a 20 acre tract. And then in 2000 a fire originated on the Hanford reservation came across the top of the mountain of the Air Land Ecology Project. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation would not let them fight the fire on that project.
That fire burned approximately 300,000 acres and 10 homes and over 100 outbuildings. My loss in that fire was easily $500,000. Now I was in real trouble because of the wayI had been handling my money.
I went to the LDS Church for some help and it was readily given at this time. However my Bishop brought up the idea of how I was running my life. This was the beginning of running my life like a business. I had a small repair shop that I used on the side and made pretty good money with it and I actually handled that much different than I did my personal finances. This Bishop suggested that we work a budgeting program out. I can tell you that up until that time I had never even considered budgeting. We worked out a prioritized budget. In other words it was based upon paying the most important things first. That included things like:
· Tithing.
· Land payment.
· Electricity.
· Food eat.
· Gas to get to work.
· Kids expenses.
· Personal expenses.
· Savings.
Other categories were included in this and there were a lot of things in it. The outcome was, I wrote a computer program to run on Open Office and called itprioritized budget.
You could take that budget and if you made the right entries control your family expenses very easily.
That was just the beginning, from there I went and organize my family as a business. In fact I put together a limited liability corporation to handle all the family money. This had a couple of advantages, first it protected my money from creditors and secondly it made it a lot of my normal personal expenses tax-deductible. I would recommend that any family run their life as an LLC.
This will allow them to get their finances in order. Just doing the simple things has allowed us to live on much less income and to live fairly well. We don’t drive new cars and we do not put new shades in the house every year.
Back to the story, I told you about the losses we had from the Hanford fire in 2000. In all reality there was no recovering from those losses. We got enough money out of the insurance companies and by turning in my 401(k), to buy a new house for my daughter which was burned in the fire. She and her husband found out that she was pregnant just about the time the fire hit and they were not in position to get housing or anything else like that.
We had a building there around our pumphouse that had everything that our middle daughter had and it was stored in it while she was in the Navy. It also included all of our family heirlooms this building burned.
I learned a really valuable lesson from this fire. It is not things that are important but is people. We use our place is a place for people to come dump their junk as they clean up their places. Any money that we got from that was given back to the victims of fire.
One of the contractors that I had worked for at Hanford Nuclear Reservasion gave a large block of money to the Red Cross with the understanding that it be distributed to the victims of the fire.
Well if you know anything about the Red Cross the first thing that they do is send a major chunk of that money back east for their company funds. After all the head of the Red Cross makes over $1 million a year salary. Well this company was not very happy about that and neither was I. Somehow or other I got to be a a leader of this group of people who were burned out. We got that money back and distributed to people to help rebuild. I took none of it. One of the regional Red Cross managers called me,” You poor white trash.” I could tell you stories of the Red Cross that would make your hair catch on fire.
That led to a lawsuit against the Department of Energy for failing to control the fire. I made a couple mistakes here, the first was I contact a law firm to take the lawsuit on up at a percentage rather than trying to raise the money to do it correctly. And I let them sue the wrong parties. If they had sued the contractor that owned the Hanford site contract at that time. The lawsuit would’ve been settled with no court costs because their contract with the Department of Energy required the Department of Energy indemnify them for any losses. Well, to make a long story short. The Department of Energy bought off the lawyers and arranged a very minimal suit settlement for those damaged. However we achieved one major goal from this lawsuit. That was, that this kind of action could not happen again. The Arid Land Ecology project was opened up to allowed firefighting on the project to protect the off land areas. Last year we had almost the same scenario start but the local fire departments went in and quickly quell that spreading fire.
The question, is what does all this have to do with running your life like a business. The first thing is that you have to be cognizant of the problems that develop, be prepared for the unexpected and have a plan of what to do an emergency as an aside I write books and articles on being prepared whether it be financial or in another form. This story gives you a pretty good idea why you should run your family like a business.
SOME IDEAS YOU SHOULD CONSIDER?
· What is your real income?
· What are your real expenses?
· What are your necessary expenses?
· Have you prioritize your expenses?.
· Do you have a bookkeeping system?
· Is your family organized as an LLC?.
· If you need it do you have professional advisors for your LLC?
· What are your advantages to having an LLC?.
You should carefully consider each of these areas, then develop a plan to run your family as a business. One last thing do you have the necessary expertise to keep the books for your family LLC? If you don’t I recommend you take some courses to get that expertise. You need to do your own books.
This story does not give you the whole picture. You will need to do your own research and figure out how to run your family is a business. Believe me it’s well worth the effort. We still don’t have a lot of money or cars or any of that stuff but we are able to live within my Social Security and retirement. And in this day and age that is a miracle in itself.
Resources That Will Help You
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) This is a good site with lots of information. https://www.fema.gov/
The web site and pages of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is a great source of info for preparedness. https://providentliving.org/?lang=eng
Mother Earth News is a magazine and web site that I have followed for years. Mother Earth News
This is my blog site where you can get all kinds of information about becoming self sufficient.
One of the greatest and most worthwhile projects that I have come across in my 70 or so year of life is the 5 Bucks a day process. Better than me try to explain it this link takes you to a web site that will blow your mind. This thing really works.
Here is where you can get a list of all Bud’s Books and a lot more. Some really are FREE!
Get Recommendations of Books To Read
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