I get home and see a piece of paper filled with calculations with big numbers and dollar exchange rates. I look at the numbers and know instantly what happened. I go to Dad and my suspicion turns out to be true: we sold that house! Wohoooo! After many months of back and forth (trust me, it was SUPER stressful) and trips to the Brazilian Consulate, we finally did it. The house is sold, fair and square! Phew! (to my Brazilian friends, chillax, it's not the home in Sao Paulo).

So a big congrats is in place for Dad, who took all upon himself to finalize the deal. At times the stress was so great that I'd worry about his health. Thankfully, he can now sleep better at night.

Until the crazy novel of selling the remaining properties resume. My oh my. However, those should be easier :)

In any case, now that we have the cash, I was tempted to press for the new car since we were already planning on getting rid of the beloved (and very famous) 99 Corolla. However, upon further weighing the options, I believe it'd be in the best interest of our family if we took this chance and opened a business. Opening a business needs capital (duh) and we should take this opportunity and slowly make our break from weekly paychecks.

As Robert Kiyosaki puts, invest in your assets. A car and a house are not assets. Unless you sell cars and flip houses. But at least from my point a view, a car is a big liability, since it requires maintenance costs and it does not make me money.

So I was thinking about some possible investments. Those are fine, but I think we need a more active income. We can't rely on market fluctuations (even if we're talking about a portfolio with high bond exposure) to bank for growth. Also, we can not take the risk of having a portfolio with a high beta. So that puts investments out of the picture. (Unless I win the powerball, then I'll def. invest that thing and just live on the interest hehe)

That leaves us with investing the money into a business. Until now, that seems to be the best alternative. Now unfortunately the sum of money is not extremely big, so we'll have to use it all. Ideal scenario would be to divide the money in 3 parts (not necessarily equal portions) and have them distributed into the following:

1. Business
2. High bond exposure portfolio or MMA
3. Growth oriented porfolio --> filled mainly by maxing out traditional IRA's.

The reason I thought about using IRA's to fund a growth oriented portfolio is that it is money which is not taxed. In a growth portfolio, you are mainly investing in more volatile stock, which can be a mix of midcap stock and international stock and other things that I don' t know of haha.

The more you put in, the more you will gain in case of a market spike. You want your money to go in tax free because you want to maximize the amount of money going in to give you the most growth. Also, in case the market turns bad (which is usually the case now) you'll be losing less money permanently. In a traditional scenario where you'd be using post-tax money, you'd be losing your money as well as a portion that was paid in taxes, which you will never make it up even when the market tuns up again.

Of course, the ideal scenario here is to not have to pay taxes in any investment portfolio. Not sure if it's possible. However, if you're caught in a situation where you have to choose between ONE of them, I'd save the tax free advantage to fuel my growth portfolio. I'm no professional planner so take it with a grain of salt. Actually, with a LOT of salt haha

Now we're looking into business that do not require a high initial investment and a steep learning curve. That rules out the food industry as a whole, I think.

The industry which suits these two key requirements is the services industry. We perform a service at a reasonable cost. This can vary from dry cleaning stores to some sort of home improvement such as hardwood floor installation. The initial cost is considerably smaller than a traditional business and the return is as fast as you can get the job done well.

So another thought I'm having is to install hardwood floors in my home and take pictures and show to family friends who are interested in having the same service performed at their house. We'd all keep our day jobs and have this be a word-of-mouth kind of business. No need to build fancy websites or to do advertisement.

Word of mouth is, as learned in my previous company, the best kind of advertisement you can get.

Now that's an idea.

And to start, in order to keep your status as a member of the LC, you will have to allow us to install hardwood floors in your home. Bwhahahaha :)