A Little History About Myself

I was born to a family of 10 children in the early 60's toward the end of the baby boomer generation. My father, although blessed with many talents and a hard working man (when he kept a job) was an alcoholic and a wife beater. By the time I came along my mother had had enough and they were divorced not long after I was born. Being the 60's there were not many opportunities available for a single mother with 10 children, still my mother being the strong willed type managed to keep a roof over our heads and keep us all together. She married my stepfather a few years later and I was blessed with a younger sister who has always been my best friend. Not long after they were married, my stepfather moved us to the bootheel of Missouri, not far from Poplar Bluff, where he worked as a farmhand and a share cropper. Needless to say, we were very poor. I remember a lot of tough times, having to do without a lot because we just could not afford it. After 10 years together, my mother discovered my stepfather was having an affair and decided to take the kids and move back to central Missouri where she was originally from. I suppose she had hopes that he would come to his senses, and perhaps he would have eventually, but he met with a tragic death in his early 30's. I wanted to tell this story, not for the sake of garnering simpathy, but to give the reader an idea of where I came from. I started life with very little in a material sense and in the sense of a financial education. I've always believed that your life, no matter how good or how bad it starts, is really what you make of it. As an adult, I made a lot of poor choices in my early years and for that I have only myself to blame. However, I also realized that there are many ways you can bring about positive changes in your life. I have spent the last several years educating myself about investing. From the start I had intended to learn about investing, make a pile of money and then write a book about how I did it. Not so much to profit from the book, but to help others who were starting the way I did, with nothing. Most investment books and articles I have read and most of the programs I have seen on television seem to be geared towards people who already have at least some money. When I say I started with nothing, I mean I literally had only the shirt on my back to start over again at the age of 33. Even now, I don't have a great job, I don't make a lot of money from my hourly wage or from my investments. It's very unlikely that I will ever inherit any money or come in to any great windfall of cash. However, I do have the knowledge and the experience that I didn't have back then and things are really starting to fall in to place. So instead of waiting to write the book, I decided it would be a good idea to chronicle the story in blog form and readers could follow along for the duration. At this point, I don't have much doubt that I will reach my goals, but telling the story as I go is very appealing to me and I hope will be of interest to others who might want to follow along. I most certainly welcome advice from others along the way and hope that my example might inspire people who, like myself, may not see any way out of the wage slave racket of going to work day after day and spending all their hard earned cash to pay bills and just get by. Opportunities and money abound in this country, that's why so many people want to come here. Sometimes when you're so close to something every day, you don't really notice it. I've finally realized it was time to open my eyes and my mind to all the possibilities and to take action to get from where I am to where I want to be. The future starts NOW!