Those are the exact words, that came from my wife…. What do we do now?
It was the day our youngest son, Max, passed his driving test.
He drove, when it was time for him and his sister to go to work. They both have part time jobs at a local Gastro Pub…
( Why they can't just be pubs anymore? I don't know!)
For the past 25 years, since Tom had been born ( Our eldest son) we have been completely focused on their upbringing.
We have been blessed with four children, ( We lost Number 3, as a still birth, so although Max is technically 4th we always regard him as our third child and he certainly acts like one!) Tom, Sarah, Max and Molly.
Tom and Sarah are grown, flown and settled. Both with careers and steady partners, houses, and hobbies…
Max and Molly are now independent, and although not fully fledged, they are certainly spreading their wings and looking to fly the nest. So … What do we do now?
What Do We Do Now?
It is a slightly scary feeling, we were just sitting watching the news, the kids left, and we realised that for the first time we were redundant. We were no longer needed.
Now do not get me wrong I am not saying that simply by passing a driving test the children suddenly had no need of emotional, or any other support. Of course they do, and I imagine they will continue to do for a long time.
But, we were physically free from the hands on transporting, Dads / Mums Taxi service, we could realistically get ourselves away, at weekends and they could be self sufficient.
The challenge we actually faced was not so much …”What do we do now?”… but actually
So Who Are You?
Like the couple in the picture…. opposite ends of the sofa, each in our own world, when suddenly all the noise stopped and we looked around and there we both were! blinking in the headlights… er “SO …. who are you?”
It was as though the last 25 years had been so busy for each of us we took our focus off caring for each other, and lavished all our attention onto the needs of the children.
Now we were free from that, we were suddenly faced with the prospect of being together, in a room with a virtual stranger…
The nearest I can describe this is like your best friend at work retiring, you promise to keep in touch, you had hours of fun at work together, slagging the boss off, slagging colleagues off, slamming each other, pranking team mates together … all that stuff you do… Then they leave, one weird phone call with your best friend in the ear shot of their spouse, and you never ever hear from them again!
The job was your only common interest… without it you have nothing to talk about, so the daily chats and banter dry up, and you are left bereft.
Our Empty Nest was Hollow and Quiet
And we still had two kids at home.
We have never been much into endless hours of TV, I have always sailed , with the children, ( it was always the deal I could go sailing as long as I did not widow Judi on the shore with four kids)
Judi has countless things she is involved with, WI, Painting, Book Clubs, Endless coffee mornings, charity stuff….
There was little we did in common, together.
We had just sold the caravan, we were supposed to be replacing it with a motor home so we could escape at weekends. However financial pressures had put paid to all that…
So here we were, with the rest of eternity to look forward to, and a virtual stranger to share it with…
We Needed Funds
The growing and imminent departure of the brood was a blessing financially. Please do not get me wrong. I love all my kids and would never swap them. Nor do I have any regrets at all for the choices we made.
But it has been tough you know. We had a bankruptcy 15 years ago when a business venture of mine collapsed .
Since then things have always been tight, not hard… just tight. Working pay check to pay check sort of thing, never having much to spare, always getting by, but some months having nearly more month than money…
Now here we are with time on our hands, needing to re-engage with each other, and not quite having the Baby Boomer lifestyle we had promised ourselves.
The Retirement Picture
I do not know what sort of retirement you have or had planned. Ours was something like this
- Retire at 45 /50
- Travel the world in the first year
- There after target our favourite spots for two annual trips
- Minimum 2 weekends a month exploring the UK in our Camper
- Eat out three times a week,
- Visit friends and Children regularly
Not staggering … we never wanted to have three houses around the world and travel for eternity, but we were struggling to even retire at 67 ( my latest projected age for the state pension)
In fact, thanks to the banking collapse and the pension scams etc etc I was looking at working way into my 70's just to pay the utilities.
Please do not feel sorry for me, I am not telling you this to gain your sympathy.
I am trying to paint a picture of where I was mentally, when my wife dropped the bombshell that actually she felt we had so little in common that she wasn't sure if she could be bothered to re-engage. We had done a great job on the kids, why are we bothering to get into each others lives, we have our things to do, lets just focus on getting the last two launched then we can literally sell up and move on.
I understood, lets be fair… My solution was sell up and move aboard a canal boat FFS … Seriously, what was I thinking, my wife gets motion sickness watching a fish tank!
The Problem
The problem was not that we were strangers, or that we had nothing in common. The problem was simply we had all the time in the world with no income, or savings. Or we were both working flat out to stand still financially.
Seriously … Who would want to stay in that!
I knew I had to find some sort of passive income, that gave me funds to provide leisure and relaxation, without consuming all my / our time…
I really felt I had found this in Amway,
- I really got the elements of time leverage,
- The way you could develop a passive residual income.
- I loved that I could not earn until I had helped my prospects earn.
- I loved that it was more about building teams, than business….
- I was daunted about the Americanisms, and the hoopla meetings,
- I was daunted about the sharing with family friends…
- Hey I got it
But wow the endless churn was immense…. I was exhausted. I loved the concept, I knew it worked, but I could not just push it over the edge … I was driving thousands of miles a month showing endless plans, and making no progress.
I told myself I didn't quit, but I did. It was not a spectacular flounce, I just quietly slowed down. Missed the odd function, showed one plan a week less to have family time…. ( This actually was essential. I was watching the kids grow up asleep !)
In a matter of months I went from showing 3 plans a week, with all the follow ups and start ups that that entails. To only doing a few a month for downline, and just helping team members out….
I felt justified in doing that, I had been working the business hard for over 4 years… The trouble was, in a business of duplication… yes you guessed it, the team beneath did what I did
Not what I told them to do!
So, Just like an electric fan when it is unplugged, my Amway business slowly ground down to a halt… imperceptible at first, the money kept coming in, the residuals were great, but eventually these too died, and we were left supplying our core customers turning over £200 retail a month…. Even that died off
What Is The Solution
Get More Money!
Yeah Right…
- I am Not Made of Bricks ( to break the post office window!)
- I believe to earn money You have to give value
- Money is earned. Not Got
- So I have to work
- I need to work smart
- I need another Duplication or Time Leverage model
- I need to Learn The Skills to achieve this
So I went on a search, where do you search nowadays? yep you got it GOOGLE
So I googled “how to make money”, I googled “How to Make Money On Line”, I Googled, “How To Make Money on The internet”
Hells teeth, there are endless opportunities out there aren't there… and it all looks so easy… link after link after link I followed, all headed to faceless pay me screens…
I looked at selling stuff on eBay. I was going to buy a van and go onto free-cycle grab stuff for free and then put it on eBay…. cool idea.
Question for you… why do people put stuff on Free-cycle? cos it wont F34king sell on EBAY!
Months passed and a lot of money wasted…
I am nothing if not persistent though… I eventually found people I could talk to…people who would come out from behind the computer, and stand by what they were sharing, people I grew to know, people I started to like, and people who I eventually learnt to trust….
Now my experience is not uncommon, may be you can relate to it?
Perhaps like me, you are still in the research stage, you are sick of ploughing even more money into another internet scheme. My wife got heartily sick of it, even more so, she got sick of the sight of the back of my head as I glared angrily into the computer screen, almost squeezing the blessed thing trying to get money to come flowing out as all the adverts suggested it would!
Wake Up, Smell the Roses, Look at The Truth
Dare I suggest ~ Listen to your spouse? Ha I did . . .
I am now in a position where I know,
- how we are going to afford retirement
- how we are going to do what we want to do
- when we want to do it
I am not going to go into massive amounts of detail here…
I 
am impressed that you have seen it through this far to be honest so take a star 😉
So What Did I Find? – Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is reasonably well understood in the world today but in a nutshell here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as ‘retailer' or ‘brand'), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate'), and the customer.
The market has grown in complexity, resulting in the emergence of a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors. Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC – Pay Per Click), e-mail marketing, content marketing and in some sense display advertising.
On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner. Affiliate marketing is commonly confused with referral marketing, as both forms of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer.
[1] However, both are distinct forms of marketing and the main difference between them is that affiliate marketing relies purely on financial motivations to drive sales while referral marketing relies on trust and personal relationships to drive sales.
[1] Affiliate marketing is frequently overlooked by advertisers.
[2] While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.
In lay man’s terms, Affiliate Marketing is like incentivised sharing. By promoting (aka marketing) other people’s products through your own strategically designed websites, you can create multiple steams of income when the products are sold. You don’t have to hold stock, invest in premises, or participate in the delivery of the product. You’re basically a middle man and don’t need to get involved in any of the other gubbins that typical businesses entail!
As a 50- something truck driver who was struggling to turn a computer on, knowing where to start was extremely daunting. It was a complete paradigm shift for me, and despite not knowing where to start I knew I had to make it work. I had a very strong reason why I needed to succeed, and this was more than enough to keep me determined to push through the inevitable obstacles.
The Digital Marketing Training
By the time I found this on-line training, I was cynical… I was like the old Amway prospect in a house meeting, with that “you aren't getting me” look.
You know arms crossed, legs crossed,In fact, if I had two of anything, they were crossed. Wallet, locked in my briefcase, locked in the boot, in the car, locked in the garage! Seriously “you Aren't getting me ”
But the more I looked, the more I thawed out, relaxed. These guys came out from behind the screen. They answered all my questions. They did not try to sell me something and go.
This was two years ago… I have invested a large amount of my spare time in the last two years, and reasonable of amount of cash, into my education, and myself, and my business.
It was a shaky start, I was suspicious. But, the more I looked, the more I liked.
So much so, that for education in on line marketing, combined with an ability to earn whilst you learn, I only choose to promote One System.
It is An Educational System, that has an inbuilt affiliate offer attached. The two founders, are trusted mentors, NOW,
I was suspicious again here, they look so young , so slick, like smooth operating Drug Dealers frankly! They both seem to spend far too much time on holiday, and drive exotic expensive cars.
Please do yourself a favour, look beyond your initial reaction, I am so glad I did. I do not have to promote these guys, they are perhaps the best marketers the world has produced to date. They have paid out more than $40mm in the last 8 years in affiliate commissions alone. This is aside from personal wealth and promotions they do.
They are still in the trenches, at the cutting edge, they are not just Gurus teaching other peoples Ideas, they still practice what they preach.
I have spent time with them in the UK, and in Miami on a recent DEA Black Business Retreat, They are, as they appear. There is no front. What you see is what you get.
In A Nutshell
From a place of quiet desperation, where I was, living each month, pay check to pay check, quietly drawing the curtains on a Sunday evening desperately hoping praying, constantly wishing ” There has To Be More To Life Than This”.
Grinding each month out, surviving… I, no sorry. We are in a place where
- We know when we can stop going to work.
- We know when we are going to retire to full time living.
- We have found people who are like minded, who care.
- We are in a business model that values people over profit.
- Life style over cash
OK,what about you? If you find yourself relating to this post, maybe you have experienced something similar to me. I'd love to share with you the same free videos that I stumbled across and that had such an impact on me.
This information truly showed me a new way to not only get myself free and out of from my current situation of feeling trapped. But also exactly how it's now possible in todays online world to be able to find opportunities that give me the ability to write my own paycheck and take control of my future finances and freedom.In fact a way to create my own lifestyle, that I love I'd truly love to think I can help a few people by just simply sharing this stuff. https://stevegreenhalgh.co.uk/lsmob/
Another quick point I’ll make. Is that each video, which will be delivered one day at a time over the next week (to save information overload) will probably set off so many lightbulb moments when it comes to solving the problems I have been sharing here, like feeling trapped and limited with your income options.
You can access the first of the videos here https://stevegreenhalgh.co.uk/lsmob/
If you have any questions for me at all after checking this out. I'm here and always happy to help anyone who can relate to the things I have shared.
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog…. If you have got here … I am pretty sure you will qualify… but lets have a chat to confirm it
Take Care
ps for more pictures from Miami and an informal chat why not come and meet up in facebook
*DISCLAIMER:-