One example of a leveraged business or a residual income opportunity is real estate for investment.  Let’s say you could:

• Buy a property valued at 100,000 for $10,000 down.
• Borrow the rest.  The cost to own and insure that property is $800 per month. 
• Rent it for $1,000 per month.
• Your residual income is $200 per month for an investment of $10,000. 
• This is earning you about 24% interest on your $10,000 investment.

Also included in property investment are depreciation tax advantages and property value appreciation over time (yes, I know right now property values are dropping) and you will gain there also.  So real estate investment is highly leveraged.

The risks involves include tenants that trash your property or don’t pay, decreasing property values and property loss due to unforeseen events which can be insured for.

What if you don’t have $10,000 and a great credit rating or don’t want to work for tenants? Then one of the best ways to make money is with an MLM or multi level marketing business. Everyone from Donald Trump, Robert Kiyosaki and Oprah Winfrey are claiming that these residual income opportunities are a great way for everyday people to leverage their time and limited financial resources and make good money. These people are rich. Do you think they’d be recommending you work for $20 per hour as a great opportunity when this kind of business if done properly could get you in the $10,000 per week range? This is one of the best ways to make money;  use a leveraged residual income opportunity. It is great for a work from home mom.

How is a successful MLM business leveraged? Simply stated you find several business partners and nearly everyone else you find does the same.  Everyone participating gets a piece of the pie.  The more people consuming products, the more you make.

People often refer to these businesses as scams or pyramids.  Believe me.  There may be a few mlm scams out there but most of the well known ones are very legitimate businesses with excellent products, training and resources and are designed to make you, the work from home mom, a lot of money, legally.

These are great residual income opportunities for a work from home mom since you are your own boss. You set your own hours and work as hard or easy as you want.  Rewards come from your own efforts.

Someone I heard the other day mentioned his definition of a financial pyramid and I had to laugh.  So company BCA (Big Corporate America) has a president or two, a bunch of vice presidents, executive directors and 26 levels of people higher than the workers that actually do the work, not just plan and organize it.  The people at the top make way more money than the people at the bottom.  There are less people at the top and more at the bottom.  Tell me, if you’re not the guy at the tippy-top, do you want to spend your life in this corporate pyramid?

In a legal MLM business, each and every person has the same chance to make money.  You are rewarded by your ability to add motivated team members. It’s much more “fair” that rewards be given to those who earn it. Any WAHM know about fair right?  Your kids remind you very day.

One piece of information that I have observed is that you don’t need to personally sponsor a lot of people in order to be successful in an MLM business.  I’ve heard it from three different people who are extremely successful in MLM. One has personally sponsored only 20 people and has a team of over 2,000. One person works solely using the internet and has personally sponsored 36 people and has a team approaching 4,000 and this occurred in about three years. One guy said he and his wife sponsored again about 20 people in 18 months and has built a large team and gained a significant residual income.

With most network marketing opportunities you’ll be breaking even on your investment after getting about eight people in your team.  In the beginning it might seem challenging to find people interested in joining your business.  If you make a commitment to make it work, it will. You must keep at it. You need to sort through people as fast as possible in order to succeed quickly.  Your job is to find the right people, not convince the wrong ones.

I’ll be writing more on these topics soon.  Get a copy of at least six ways a work from home mom can make money for college or anything else. http://mompays.com.  There are several residual income opportunities identified in the free audio and report. 

If you are currently involved in any kind of MLM recruiting check out this system I use to increase my sponsor rate.  Would you like to increase your business?  htp://NetworkMarketSuccess.net.

Anyone can get a job working for someone else. Most people do and it’s perfectly good.  However, as a busy single mom, you need more time an more money than a trade dollars for hours job can provide.  If you’re interested in keeping your current job and making extra income by working at home, great.  If you need to get a day job for a while, then by all means take care of yourself.  Hopefully soon you’ll become so successful that you won’t have to keep the regular job if you don’t want to.  Then you can do whatever it is you want, travel with your kids and stay in nice places and not have to worry about the expenses, pay for college, whatever.

Working for yourself can be a huge struggle.  If you’ve found something that has really made you successful financially overnight, I want to know about it. So send me an email.  I have found that any reward is going to take effort.  But the great thing about having a leveraged business is that the rewards can be larger than your input over time if you plan well. And you get to keep them.

Looking forward to sharing what I learn in the hopes in will benefit you too. 

Lana

Let’s say I’ve had it with the day job. My debt is beyond belief. I have no time to spend with my kids or family. I’ve read the Rich Dad Poor Dad books and decided that I no longer want to trade time for money but I have no idea on how to get started in my own home based business or how to become an entrepreneur. What do I do?

Well there are successful home based business plans available to single moms who want to build wealth that are already set up, running and making huge profits. And the beauty is they are looking for other single moms to partner with and are willing to help them develop their business. These businesses help other achieve their goals, so if you’d be the type of person that would be willing to help others achieve their goals too, this could be right for you.

How easy would it be to start one of these? Most of these companies have a very low entry cost, from $30 – $200 and a low monthly participation cost, about $150 – $300 per month that could be earned back within a few weeks or months. Income potential is unlimited. You do have to work at it to get there and they are not get rich quick schemes. But the amount of work that you put in over time compared to the amount of reward possible is so different that this type of business would be considered truly leveraged. Plus, you develop a work plan suited to your own schedule. You get to see your kids during the day if you want.

These types of business take advantage of current trends like distribution, baby boomers, the health care and wellness industry, plus the shift from the industrial age to the information age driven by the internet. This is the perfect storm of entrepreneurship and suited to single moms. Millions of dollars are waiting to be made, now and in the next several years.

Read “The Next Millionaires” by Paul Zane Pilzer or “Rich Dad’s Business School for People Who Like Helping People”. These books are great resources for the kind of business I’m about to tell you about.

What is it? It is direct sales or network marketing. “Oh my gosh,” you say. “I can’t sell anything.” Neither can I but I can learn what it takes to become a millionaire real fast. One of the first things that come to mind when the words network marketing are mentioned is the old model of making a list with all your friends, family, acquaintances, people you see walking down the street, people you don’t even like and everyone that has an occupation that you can think of — then calling them. Yes. This could be though of as scary by most.

And besides scary, it’s not that productive. Where is it written that perfect strangers even care who you are let alone are interested in some whacky business or product you are trying to promote? This is not to say that you can avoid talking to people in network marketing, on the contrary. You want to talk to people and show them how easy it is, but you don’t want to talk it into people. You want people to come to you and ask to be shown.

And how is it that the internet which is connected to literally billions of people isn’t the most awesome tool for finding new people? Tell that to the list makers.

How do you get people to come to you? It’s called attraction marketing and basically you become a desired force or expert in a specific niche and people want to learn from you. At that time they are open minded enough to listen and consider network marketing as a viable business opportunity for them. It takes time, but consider the alternative of working until you are 65 and retiring on half your salary and having your kids live at home with you while they go to community college.

There are over 1,600 network marketing companies around. Some are much better than others. Be careful because some of the companies will hold you hostage for six months with a non-compete clause which means you can’t legally join any other program or they can sue you. Do your research. Talk to people who are active in plans. Pick the best payout and then have the person who signs you up help you to achieve success. They will be happy to help because your success improves their success. You can find the best home based business for single moms with some research and by talking to people. Lots of people are willing to help you.

Click here for a detailed report and audio from Lana Hawkins about How Single Moms Can Earn Money For College.

I just read a great book by Timothy Ferriss called The 4 Hour Work Week. It’s a must for any person who wants more say in their life. The ideas are different than usual.  Instead of dreaming up ways to cram so much more into your life Ferriss recommends eliminating a lot.  Read it for yourself. 

Looking for a way to pay for college or anything else? Take a listen to my free audio interview and read the report offered as a download. Click here: How Single Moms Can Pay For College.

(1)  No time, and no money.

If you are an employee, chances are this describes the way you feel. You can’t go shopping on a Tuesday afternoon or tell your boss to take a hike. How will you even be able to afford to send your kids to college, save for retirement or even think of having a life today with no time and no money?

(2)  No time, lots of money.

Some “successful” self-employed, professionals and small business owners are in this category. They are slightly better off than the employee because they earn more, but they have to work even harder than employees to keep up with the diminishing profit margins, competition and servicing their customers. As a single mother, do you want to spend much less time with your kids?

(3)  Lots of time, no money.

A lot of farmers, villagers, college dropouts or bums have lots of time but no money. Maybe ignorance is bliss, but without a stable source of income, how long can you last many days forward? If you’re a single mom, you know that your kids will need food, clothes plus medical care for that broken arm or leg. Not a great place to be in my opinion.

(4)  Lots of time, and lots of money.

It is the category that big business owners, landlords, investors are in. Imagine, not having to work for money, but having money to work for you by investing them and earning profits by using your money to make money. Also, you’re smart enough to hire the best people so you don’t even have to work. Just think about how many people you could help out in the no time, no money category A lot of people like it there.

Here are Two Questions for You

• Which one of the four categories best describes your current situation?

• Which one category would give you the most opportunity to be a great single mother?

If you answered with time and money you’re the kind of person that stands a chance of getting there. Because as Henry Ford put it “If you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

Yes you can do anything you want and with the internet and all the information and services readily available there is every reason a determined single mom could be in the time and money category rather quickly.

Lana Hawkins is the author of How Mom Pays for College Blog. If you’d like ideas about becoming a single mother with both Time and Money person get the Free Audio Interview with Lana covering many ideas on how single moms can earn money for college go to http://howsinglemomscanpayforcollege.com/ . Make sure to download the Free Report too.

• Trading Time For Money – employees, self-employed

• Manifesting & Using Creative Ideas – inventors, artists, programmers

• Leveraging resources and other people – business people, leaders, systems

Let’s focus on leveraging your talents. Anybody can get a job. It’s what most of us were taught and all we know. Stepping outside the box we can try new ways of living.

If you are a professional, have you ever explored writing an e-book about your field of expertise? If well written, it could provide a new income stream, instead of you selling out your time serving your clients. The effect is leveraged once you build your automatic system for making the transaction and advertising.

You can repeat the process each time you create new information products.  After time you could build a membership site and offer all of your great products and ideas to loyal customers that will pay a small monthly fee to have access to your great information.

How about a computer programmer? You can come out with your own revolutionary product instead of selling your ideas to the company you work for. How about making a small utility program that helps out internet entrepreneurs? You could design an easy to use program that generates friends in multiple Web 2.0 sites.

How about real estate, instead of selling houses, you can pool financial sources to buy houses cheap, increase their value and sell them off at a higher price. It just takes a little time and research to find good ideas and locations. And watch the market so you can time your purchases for gain, not loss.

Is money a problem? Seek out loans if you can take the risk. Pool money from many investors or seek a grant. The sky is the limit when it comes to making money.

Sometimes your credit card company will offer short term, no interest loans for about 6 months.  This might be a great way to generate short term cash for a specific project. However, do not take this offer is you are not able to pay it off before the due date.  The interest penalty is usually huge and defeats the purpose of making money.

So once you’ve decided on a way to have time and money then you are free to explore the creative ideas category to its fullest.  You’ll have the time and money to do it.

Life is pretty darn short. And your kids grow up quickly. I don’t know about you but I want to live my life now and when I’m 65 ½. If you are looking you will find ways to join the having time and money crown, the new rich. See you there!

Again, which way do you want to achieve wealth? Answer: it’s totally up to you. For ideas on ways to make money listen to the Free audio interview with Lana Hawkins, author of http://MomPaysforCollege.com/blog at http://howsinglemomscanpayforcollege.com

When you get to the audio page, download the great report with even more information and an opportunity for a private business consultation with Lana.