We Are Under Attack

We are under attack!

Have you had enough of being the worker bee, while others are enjoying most of the honey?

Most Americans work hard all week, but end up with only the left-overs of the income they earned. They have a sense that the deck is stacked against them, and although some enemies of the financial wellbeing are obvious others are not. In any case most folks don’t have a clue what to do about it, if there is anything they can do.

Well there is! And that’s what SMARTEST Wealth Systems is all about.

For more than a quarter century we’ve been helping people pay off their debts and begin accumulating wealth that can generate income in their future. To date, we’ve been honored to assist more than 3 million people onto the road that leads to real, predictable financial independence.

Because of my own crash-and-burn experience in the late 1980’s, I was fixated on debt as the major culprit holding people back from the life and lifestyle their income should provide for them.

I was right. At least I was partly right.

We are being abused

The financial reality most people face reminds me of Israel in the Bible when they were slaves in Egypt. They were the compulsory laborers producing prosperity for their oppressors. We’re told in Exodus 5:6-8 – That same day Pharaoh sent this order to the Egyptian slave drivers and the Israelite foremen: “Do not supply any more straw for making bricks. Make the people get it themselves! But still require them to make the same number of bricks as before. Don’t reduce the quota.”

That’s us. After taxes, fees, and interest charges, we’re left with less and less of the money we earn, but we’re pushed to meet all our other life obligations anyway. We’re given no straw to make our bricks, but our quota is not reduced. The cost of living continues to rise, but we’re left with less and less of our resources to meet that cost.

The financial drain from using credit cards and loans is only part of the full picture. As I dug into the morass of personal financial information most people ignore because it’s overwhelming, I found that most of us Americans…indeed most citizens of the industrialized world…are just worker bees, plow horses, treadmill oxen grinding out our daily work. Then, when it’s time to get paid for that effort, the money is handed to us through a bucket brigade of villains who take most of it before it gets to us.

When we finally deposit our take-home income in our bank account, we think, “Ahhh. At least I have this much to live on.” Buzz!!! Wrong answer. The villains are still there, dipping into the left-overs we think are ours.

The fact is there are gigantic systems set up to financially use us to enrich those who control the systems. And we live our daily lives only recognizing the tips of these monstrous, money-siphoning icebergs, so we don’t realize how bad off we really are.

For example, taxes: if we add just the taxes that show up on our pay stub as our gross income becomes our net income, we get an average federal/state/local/payroll tax burden of 40.88% in America. That’s not just rich people. That’s the average percentage of gross income lost by average American households!

Now let’s add in interest costs. According to common lending debt-to-income ratios, banks will allow your mortgage payment to be as large as 28% of your gross income. Since, in the first decade of a typical 5% loan, the monthly payment would average about 83% interest. That means as much as 19.5% of your gross income would go to mortgage interest alone.

Add that to the 40.88% of gross income going to income and payroll taxes and you are already losing 60.33% of the money you work for to taxes and interest.

If we then begin to add in the myriad excise, property, estate, gasoline and other taxes we pay, as well as interest lost to car payments and credit card payments, it’s easy to see where a typical household could be paying more than 70% of their gross income to taxes and interest! They get to live on only 30% of the income they work for each month.

Throw in inflation, which diminishes the buying power of the 30% of dollars we’re left with, and it’s easy to see why so many families are struggling. Inflation, by the way, is – to a great extent – a result of a government system of monetary manipulation.

These money-destroying systems are intertwined into every facet of our financial lives, and while it’s impossible to completely disconnect from them, it is possible to dramatically reduce our exposure to them.

You can find out how in my book, The Banker’s Secret to Permanent Family Wealth™.