This is a reposting.  The original blog was posted last Mar 2013.

A few days has passed since I attended the 2 days Wealth Summit plus bonus 1 day and I still feel I’m walking on Cloud Nine.  It was worth going back to Manila to attend the seminar, to learn new things, to meet people with the same mindset and same dream of becoming financially free and truly rich to share our blessings with the less fortunate.

I am blessed that one of my mentors is Brother Bo Sanchez as he was very generous in sharing his mentors with the attendees of the Wealth Summit recently held in PICC, Manila.  Mind you I have attended a few seminars regarding financial literacy but more I have attended more seminars related to Supply Chain but I must say that this is a very different seminar but in a special way.  The seminar starts and ends with worship by praising, giving thanks to the Lord for all the blessings and giving it all back to Him who has blessed us with our gifts and talents.

Every time it was worship time I will become teary eyed because the feeling of overwhelming gratitude is still very raw as God has not only answered our prayers of meeting our target for our latest outreach program of helping build a library in the Benguet region but has even surpassed our expectations that we are able to donate hygiene kit, books, school supplies, some food for the children (powdered chocolate and juice drink and some biscuits) and cash for the renovation of the library building.  But the story of the outreach will be in an altogether different blog.

Now going back to me sharing my thoughts about the Wealth Summit.  The first few hours of the first day different people shared their stories on how they rose from nothing to something, from rags to riches, from dark night of the soul to the light of God and overcoming depression to be a success in the field they have chosen.  It was more of learning about the characteristic, personality and vision and not the technical side of financial literacy.  Hearing about people’s inspiring stories to be better at whatever field we have chosen and to even continuing to challenge ourselves to be better employees or businessmen and appreciating what we have and using our past to fuel our passion and dream of achieving our goals and being successful as what we have defined it and making God the center of everything we do in order for us not to lose our way.  I felt this way a way to help change and affirm our changing mindsets.

In IMG, we are teaching the prosperity mindset using the formula: Income – Savings = Expenses.

But during the seminar, it was being reiterated that saving is not enough and having a job is not enough and we should pursue a secondary stream of income and not just saving our money but investing it in different vehicles whether through mutual funds, stocks or business.

Therefore the new prosperity formula is: Income – Investments = Expenses.

Some of the talks covered different sources of getting a secondary stream of income but the highlights that have been ingrained in my mind are:

1)      Multi-Level Marketing – as mentioned by Brother Bo “we Filipinos should be open to doing MLM or networking as long as it is a legitimate and legal entity as a secondary source of income”

2)      Virtual Assistant or Using Internet in a Different Level – do part time virtual assistant and start with becoming a virtual secretary by doing business letters, memos, powerpoint presentations, etc.  Then eventually graduate to a using internet in a different level like starting a Blog and earning from it, do Internet Marketing (look at the right side of Facebook and you’ll see a lot of advertisement there) and for geeks maybe explore creating a new program, game or software (this is how Facebook started).

For myself, I have decided to study more about becoming a Virtual Assistant and I’ll share more about this topic once I have understood how it works and how to start.  As I also want to make sure I get legitimate clients and not clients who are just involved in scams.

The best part of the seminar is seeing committed people who like me travelled just to attend the seminar but some farther than me like Oman, Australia, Dubai and some locally travelled from Naga, Baguio, Tacloban.  Wherever they came from one thing is certain.  People want to be free.  Free from being financially ignorant.  Free from being tied to a stressful job that demands so much of time, emotional and physical involvement.  Free to spend more quality time with their family especially the children so as not to miss their firsts like first word, first attempt to crawl, sit and walk. Feel free to be based in the Philippines instead of being an OFW.  Thanks Brother Bo for giving us this preview that we have a choice.  Now it is up to us whether we want to take on the challenge or just stay put in our comfort zone.