Not everyone is cut out to start a business. In fact, starting a company is an irrational act. Most successful Founders bring a unique combination of drive, determination, product knowledge, creative problem-solving skills, business acumen, stamina, and a keen sense of timing, to their fledgling enterprises. And the best of these know how to communicate with a variety of audiences by telling a great story. A Founder has many audiences that compete for attention—The Core Team, Investors, Suppliers, and Customers to name a few. Each is critical to the success of a new enterprise and the ability to prioritize, communicate with them, and engage them at just the right time, is essential to the success of any start-up. With limited resources, failure to engage with any one of these important audiences at the right moment can be the difference between success and shutting down. Most successful Founders bring a unique combination of drive, determination, product knowledge, creative problem solving skills, business acumen, stamina and a keen sense of timing to their fledgling enterprises. The key to a successful start-up is solving a high value problem that customers care about and will pay for a level that provides the business outcomes desired by the product owner. In addition to sound advice for managing your product and business relative to competing products, you must get to know your customers, understanding the problem along with changing requirements and designing solutions that customers will appreciateNot everyone is cut out to start a business. In fact, starting a company is an irrational act. Most successful Founders bring a unique combination of drive, determination, product knowledge, creative problem-solving skills, business acumen, stamina, and a keen sense of timing, to their fledgling enterprises. And the best of these know how to communicate with a variety of audiences by telling a great story. A Founder has many audiences that compete for attention—The Core Team, Investors, Suppliers, and Customers to name a few. Each is critical to the success of a new enterprise and the ability to prioritize, communicate with them, and engage them at just the right time, is essential to the success of any start-up. With limited resources, failure to engage with any one of these important audiences at the right moment can be the difference between success and shutting down. Most successful Founders bring a unique combination of drive, determination, product knowledge, creative problem solving skills, business acumen, stamina and a keen sense of timing to their fledgling enterprises. The key to a successful start-up is solving a high value problem that customers care about and will pay for a level that provides the business outcomes desired by the product owner. In addition to sound advice for managing your product and business relative to competing products, you must get to know your customers, understanding the problem along with changing requirements and designing solutions that customers will appreciate.

Before the coronavirus epidemic, Amazon had been consuming some 2% of all U.S. household income, a percentage that has assuredly risen since the outbreak’s onset, particularly among the company’s more than 150+ million Amazon Prime members. While 51% of American households attend church, 62% have Prime memberships. In the best of times, the company’s presence in our daily lives is inescapable. As Amazon gains many invaluable lessons from the Covid-19 outbreak, the company will only become more ubiquitous in the decades ahead. Soberly aware of Amazon’s staying power, the CEO quipped to employees in 2018: “I predict one day, Amazon will fail. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be thirty-plus years.” At the time he made that comment, Amazon was twenty-four-years-old. Bestselling Good to Great author Jim Collins says Amazon needs to build a new mechanism for growth. That mechanism—a virtuous cycle “flywheel” that used data to attract more buyers and sellers whose new data contributions could then be harnessed by the flywheel—was championed by Bezos and today has been made to accelerate even faster using Amazon’s massive AI engines. As the author argues, Amazon is a business where AI is increasingly making the decisions that humans used to make and keeps getting smarter on its own. Rivals have taken notice. This why some companies, such as Walmart and Alibaba, have chosen to steal from Amazon’s playbook while others have tried to identify the few things the Seattle juggernaut can’t do and excel at them. Bezos has built one of the most efficient wealth-creation machines in history, a juggernaut. This convenience, however, will come at a cost. It will lead to massive job disruptions and our lives being affected by technology in ever more invasive ways. Joining us for our discussion on The Amazon Effect is Brian Dumaine who is on the phone from his New York office. Brian Dumaine is an award-winning journalist and a contributing editor at Fortune magazine. His latest book is Bezonomics: How Amazon is Changing our Lives and What The World's Best Companies Are Learning From It. Welcome to Mastering Your Money, Brian Dumaine .

What is your earliest memory of being happy? Do you remember that feeling being a kid on a warm summer night, the grass under your bare feet, and the freeing feeling of not having to go to school the next day? For me, being happy is being free like on those summer nights. We all want to be happy. It’s a full feeling. A feeling that connects us with others and deep into ourselves. Physiologically it’s pretty easy to understand – a chemical reaction happens in our brain, serotonin is released, and boom we feel great. Emotionally and spiritually it’s more complex. But how does money impact your happiness? Studies show that the correlation between your salary’s impact on your happiness up to $75,000, and then it peaks at $125,000. Meaning that people are increasingly happy until they make $125,000 and then they plateau. Join us for our discussion with Stacey Tisdale on Are You Happy?. Stacey Tisdale, a more than 20-year veteran TV broadcast financial journalist, and financial behavior expert, is one of the first women, and the first African-American to report from the New York Stock Exchange, in her role as a reporter/anchor for Dow Jones’ Emmy Award winning, Wall Street Journal Television.She then went on to become one of the first on-air reporters for CBS MarketWatch and business/personal finance correspondent for CBS News, The Early Show, CBS Evening News, and CBS Radio. Her latest book is The True Cost of Happiness: The Real Story Behind Managing Your Money Welcome to Mastering Your Money, Stacey Tisdale

In Raleigh-Durham NC area, people do the simple maneuver of converting your personal residence to a rental property. This maneuver brings with it many tax rules, mostly good when you know how they work

Many people are drowning in debt. They must deal with this debt issue in order to move forward in quest to find financial freedom or to be able to have the choice of working or not. Consumer debt including mortgages, auto loans, credit cards & student loans has increased to over $13.51 trillion dollars in the US. You have to make tough decisions about your spending and possibly your income. The most important step is to take action vs hoping your debt will go away. Taking action will forward to financial freedom and avoid you having to experience the pain of hitting rock bottom. You may have to file bankruptcy in order to have the chance at financial freedom. In order to avoid bankruptcy, you must control your spending.

There are approximately 35 million people who are millionaires in the world. As Robert J. Samuelson states so perfectly in The Washington Post, "That's about 5 percent of the U.S. adult population (241 million in 2014), or one in 20. Rarefied, yes; exclusive, no." Though the population numbers have gone up in the last year, they still prove a point. It's totally possible for you to become a millionaire. I will tell you that a lot of people will need more than a million dollar. Wealth is nothing more than a byproduct of success. The pursuit of success is dependent upon the desire to succeed and become wealthy. Wealth, therefore, is the carrot at the end of the stick. Take away that carrot and you remove the desire to succeed. Socialism not only takes away that carrot, it renders obsolete all of the necessary ingredients that make success possible: a hard work ethic, creativity, persistence, genius, good habits, overcoming fear and the courageous pursuit of dreams and goals. Success is therefore impossible in a Socialist society – why pursue success if the carrot at the end of the stick, wealth, is removed? America’s founding fathers knew this. While becoming a millionaire rarely occurs overnight, it's still an achievable dream if you work hard and use these habits: Todays show is about Millionare’s Frugal Habits is Markeith Gentry who is the WNCU’s Production Assistant and makes sure Mastering Your Money is available to our listeners. Welcome back to Mastering Your Money, Markeith Gentry

Part 2 of Do You Want To Retire Early? F.I.R.E. is an acronym. It stands for Financial Independence Retire Early. There's a growing movement of people who are practicing FIRE principles and retiring decades earlier than expected as a result. Smart, often middle-income earners are using a simple formula of high savings rates (50-70% of their incomes) + frugal living (minimalism) + low-cost stock index fund investing (Warren Buffett’s standard investment advice) in order to reach financial independence within short, usually around 10-year periods of time. For obvious reasons, FIRE is sometimes referred to as “the ultimate life hack.” This large and growing community has an ever-increasing cadre of 100+ high-traffic bloggers, most of whom chronicle their FIRE journeys and publish details of their methods, and report their actual personal financial information along the way. It’s a fascinating voyeuristic genre with an alluring punchline: retire early and pursue your true passions! There is more and more journalistic coverage of FIRE. Just search Google News for “early retirement” or “early financial independence” and you’ll find almost daily coverage of this fascinating phenomenon. Joining us for our discussion on Do You Want To Retire Early? is who is calling in from his Seattle Washington WA office . Paul Merriman is a nationally recognized authority on mutual funds, index investing, asset allocation and both buy-and-hold and active management strategies. Now retired from Merriman, the Seattle-based investment advisory firm he founded in 1983, he is dedicated to educating investors, young and old, through weekly articles at Marketwatch.com, and via complimentary eBooks, podcasts, articles, recommendations for mutual funds, ETFs, 401(k) plans and more, at Paulmerriman.com . He has 3 Complimentary Ebooks “First Time Investor: Grow And Protect Your Money,” “101 Investment Decision Guaranteed To Change Your Financial Future,” And “Get Smart Or Get Screwed: How To Select The Best And Get The Most From Your Financial Advisor.” WELCOME BACK TO MASTERING YOUR MONEY, PAUL MERRIMAN

Do You Want To Retire Early Part 1? F.I.R.E. is an acronym. It stands for Financial Independence Retire Early. There's a growing movement of people who are practicing FIRE principles and retiring decades earlier than expected as a result. Smart, often middle-income earners are using a simple formula of high savings rates (50-70% of their incomes) + frugal living (minimalism) + low-cost stock index fund investing (Warren Buffett’s standard investment advice) in order to reach financial independence within short, usually around 10-year periods of time. For obvious reasons, FIRE is sometimes referred to as “the ultimate life hack.” This large and growing community has an ever-increasing cadre of 100+ high-traffic bloggers, most of whom chronicle their FIRE journeys and publish details of their methods, and report their actual personal financial information along the way. It’s a fascinating voyeuristic genre with an alluring punchline: retire early and pursue your true passions! There is more and more journalistic coverage of FIRE. Just search Google News for “early retirement” or “early financial independence” and you’ll find almost daily coverage of this fascinating phenomenon. Joining us for our discussion on Do You Want To Retire Early? is who is calling in from his Seattle Washington WA office . Paul Merriman is a nationally recognized authority on mutual funds, index investing, asset allocation and both buy-and-hold and active management strategies. Now retired from Merriman, the Seattle-based investment advisory firm he founded in 1983, he is dedicated to educating investors, young and old, through weekly articles at Marketwatch.com, and via complimentary eBooks, podcasts, articles, recommendations for mutual funds, ETFs, 401(k) plans and more, at Paulmerriman.com . He has 3 Complimentary Ebooks “First Time Investor: Grow And Protect Your Money,” “101 Investment Decision Guaranteed To Change Your Financial Future,” And “Get Smart Or Get Screwed: How To Select The Best And Get The Most From Your Financial Advisor.” WELCOME BACK TO MASTERING YOUR MONEY, PAUL MERRIMAN