Normally at this point if I was doing a workshop, I’d be showing you some of the things that I’d show you in Cash On Demand. I’d be showing you some pictures of some boats. Pictures of a big flash house, and pictures of a posh car. And I’d be talking to you about lifestyle stuff. And I thought, “It hasn’t worked, has it?” Because I still get 95 percent of people who don’t do anything with what I’m teaching you. So how can I get this across… How can I make this so that we bring it to real world reality for everybody, and we understand actually, we need to do this stuff. Let’s just see if I can actually do that.
A quick bit of history. I’m taking this weekend for you guys as being like a fork in the road, okay? And you have two choices. You’ve got the same choices I had about eight years ago. On the one hand, I had the security of a full-time employment. On the other hand, I had this nagging doubt, this gut feel there was a better way to live your life. A better way to make money. A better way to get the freedom to actually live the life and do what you choose.
But I was at a fork. I was there, just as you are this weekend. I was there eight years ago thinking, “There’s a better way to do this.” But it was, “Do I give up the security of what I’m doing and go into the unknown, or do I stick with the secure path?” I was working for a company. I’d worked my way up through the house-building industry. I mean, totally different to what I’m doing today.
Had I taken the decision to continue the corporate path — because I thought, “The corporate path’s great. I’ll work until I’m 65, I’ll get me pension. Fantastic. I get a decent salary, nice car, health care plan, all that stuff. Nice and secure” — had I gone down that path, what I didn’t know at this fork-in-the-road time that you’re at this weekend, what I didn’t know at the time I went to the seminar was that, had I continued down that corporate path, six months after I made my decision, the company I was working for were bought out, and they fired all the people like me. So if I’d stayed with that company, I’d have been cut off in me prime, and I would have been coming back to another workshop thinking, “What the hell am I going to do now?”
The type of job I had, there are maybe six people in the country that did the type of job I did, and it was most unlikely that I’d ever get another job doing that. So my salary would just go through the floor, I had no savings or anything. I would have been bankrupt within a year, I reckon.
So the safety, the security of running for the job and sticking and hoping for a pension, it wasn’t there. I put myself in a position where somebody could say, as they do on the TV, “You’re fired.”
So I decided to go for the unknown, for the insecure route to put myself in a more secure position. And what — if anybody’s had time this morning before they came in — the big topic on the news today, all the papers. Pensions. I mean, you’ve got Gordon Brown arguing with this other guy, the Turner report, saying, “There’s not enough money left, chaps. We haven’t got enough money for the pensions. Don’t know what’s going to happen. Let’s mask it, put it off for a few years, and hope that the Tories get back in, and it’s their fault, right?”
There isn’t enough money in the pot. When the current generation gets retirement age, there isn’t enough money, and nobody’s got the answers. And obviously, we can trust the government to look after us. And when we get 65, we know they’ll come up with the cash somehow. Right. Or, you go down the other route into the unknown and you start your own business. And you get your own nest-egg, and you build your own pension scheme.
I’ve recently been working with — in my local area — there’s like a dial-a-ride bus service that the local authority run. They didn’t have enough money to buy a bus, so we bought them. We went out; we wrote them a cheque for 35 grand for this bus. It’s got all those hydraulic ramps and stuff for the wheelchairs and things. And they go around, they pick up the elderly and they take them a care centre in town. And the people that I met in the care centre are saying, “This is fantastic because I would normally stay in my flat day after day after day, and I wouldn’t see a soul. I just sit in me flat. Nothing going on, not meeting a soul. Having this bus means that I can actually go to the centre where we get a lovely cooked lunch. We get four different puddings. We do all this art and stuff.” So it’s a whole different change of lifestyle because they’ve been given this bus.
The reason I mention it is because it just struck me at the time — and again, this was in the newspapers this week — Age Concern are saying that between next… when is it? Next Wednesday? Between next Wednesday and March, 20,000 people will die of cold. People sat in their flats will freeze to death. And this is not a third-world country. This is Great Britain. This is one of the top bloody countries on the planet. And 20,000 people are going to die. The reason I mention this is because it’s very relevant to this room. If you work that out on a national… if you took the national statistics and break it down to a room of this size, what that actually means — and look around — what that means is that in this room 125 people will pass away through freezing to death. In this room.
If somebody said to you next week, “Right, that’s it. You’re retired from now. Here’s £75 a week. It’s got to pay your mortgage; it’s got to pay your rates. It’s got to pay all the bills and your food.” Could you survive on £75 a week? No! So if you don’t have any aspirations to become a multi-millionaire guy with all these flash trappings of success, at least take the stuff we’re going to teach you in the Cash On Demand course and build yourself a little nest-egg. Because there’s nobody else out there who is going to look after you.