Nina is on vacation this week. Here’s a reprint of one of her favorite posts from Sitting Pretty:

“Goals are dreams we convert to plans and take action to fulfill.” – Zig Ziglar

One of my college friends still living near my folks in our Midwestern hometown took a look at Sitting Pretty and had an accurate observation… all of us eventually turn into our parents. He remembers my mother being a newspaper “clipper” and filing everything. As a matter of fact, my mother had and continues to have several commercial issued vertical file cabinets lining the wall in a spare bedroom.

In her defense, she is a writer and adjunct professor and perhaps, it was her arsenal for considering writing topics on dreary winter days. But it sure as heck took up a lot of living space. Thank god for the digital revolution or I would probably be accused of similar abuses.

Hence the point of my friend’s comment… that Sitting Pretty consists primarily of articles on financial topics and real estate investing that have been “clipped” on the Internet. Well, jeez, I never pretended to be the one coming up with the brilliant investing ideas. There is no such thing as an original thought, you know. Rather, financial success is really just about executing on a formula. And there isn’t exactly one “right” formula either. It is more about just sticking to a plan.

This has been the secret to my financial success. The experts call it financial planning because it truly is a “plan”. It takes discipline and hard work. That’s not to say everyone who works hard will make a lot of money. Good planning is key, as is good timing and a little bit of luck. But if you focus on the basic fundamentals of accounting best described by Robert Kiyosaki in Rich Dad Poor Dad:

1. An asset is something that puts money in your pocket.
2. A liability is something that takes money out of your pocket.

“If you want to be rich, simply spend your life buying assets. If you want to be poor or middle class, spend your life buying liabilities. It’s not knowing the difference that causes most of the financial struggle in the world.”

I will try and write more personalized postings, but unless you have been an active blogger, then it is hard to understand the effort required to publish regularly especially if you, gentle reader, expect it to be original content. I usually have a pretty good “Monday-Friday” track record. But it still takes time and an early morning wake-up call to source all those damn articles and embed the corresponding web links. Clip, clip.