Travel agents were replaced by Expedia and Priceline.

Toll collectors were replaced by EZ Pass and Sun Pass.

Now 3.5 million truck drivers here in the United States will be replaced by technology like this:

In the next decade 99% of truck driving jobs will be gone, poof, vanished!

Imagine robots driving 18 wheelers all night long when the traffic is the lightest. By 2025 the only humans on a 3AM freeway will be drunks and cops, and the drunks will be passed out in the backseat of their self driving cars!

Robots drivers never sleep, they never need a bathroom break, they never get bored or distracted. Robots won’t ask for overtime pay, join unions, nor will they require paid vacations or take off for the holidays.

Robots won’t require expensive pension plans or government mandated healthcare.

Robots are an employers dream and a worker’s nightmare.

If you are in a JOB right now take a hard look at what you do and ask yourself this: will I be replaced by a robot or any other form of artificial intelligence?

The key here is ownership.

You don’t want to work in the factory, you want to OWN the robots that work in the factory, or own the repair business that fixes the robots that work in the factory.

If you are in the trucking biz you will do well if you OWN a self-driving semi, or 10 trucks, or 100.

Depending on a JOB is getting more risky as technology gets better.

I own 2 businesses. In this regard I carry far less risk than a typical white-collar guy working in a corporation.

I’ve never seen a ROBOT own a business.  

Your JOB can end today, with one decision made at headquarters by someone you might never meet.

If you depend on a JOB all your financial eggs are truly in one basket.

IF you OWN a business with multiple clients your risk is spread out among those clients. In order for Balloon Distractions to go under I would have to have hundreds of restaurants across 4 time zones decide to cancel our service. That probably won’t happen.

This is why we make sure our restaurant clients are spread across multiple brands.

You have to OWN something to survive the changes that are coming.

Build an asset that kicks off income, in addition to your job.

Use that income to pay off all your debt, then you won’t owe anything to anyone.

OWN your business, your robots, your cars and your home! Own it all.

OWN a business system.

You don’t have to invest thousands of dollars to own a business, I got my Life team started for less than $200. My investment in building my Life business was some time spent in coffee shops and gas burned in my car. Life Leadership is a technology company, with practical education via download on your smartphone.

I OWN my Life Leadership community, I can make it bigger if I find more leaders.

The robots and technology are coming, so own the robot, don’t get replaced by one!

Ben Alexander

Founder, BalloonDistractions.com

Member, LifeLeadership.com

September 2016

Let me start this post by saying that I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican.

Both parties have increased our national debt, and both parties are unduly influenced by corporate and banking interests. The chart above tells the story.

If our government was run like a business we would already be shut down.

There are efficiency consultants in the business world who could delve into the government books and identify billions in wasteful spending. The federal budget could be balanced, but this would require massive layoffs in the defense industry, as well as a downsized military.

The United States currently has 662 military bases with active personnel stationed in 80 countries!

Why does the United States have a military base in Honduras?

There should be a color-coded ballot that details the voting history for every politician.

Green for the politician who votes to eliminate costs and balance the budget, RED for any politician who votes to increase our debt.

Yellow for the politician running for office for the first time.

Imagine a color-coded ballot based on financial intelligence!

I would vote all GREEN, regardless of party affiliation. If our politicians reduced costs and made government more efficient our taxes would eventually go down.

What if we elected honest, debt-free business owners instead of law school trained bureaucrats who’ve never owned or operated a business?

I’m NOT making a case for Trump. He claims that he’s worth billions, but he might also hold billions in debt. There is a specific reason he hasn’t disclosed all of his financials.

Trump has zero integrity, and he’s in hock up to cotton candy hairline.

It would be great to see successful, debt free business owners with INTEGRITY as the political leaders of our country. There are people like that out there, but the political realm is so nasty and dishonest that good people seem to be weeded out early in the process.

Instead we have a real estate investor (and total bull-shooter) who is known for ripping people off and getting married multiple times… running against a woman who flouted national security rules and refuses to shut down a charity in her name that has raked in millions of (questionable) dollars from foreign powers.

A color coded ballot would be a simple way to change the way our politicians run government, and it would be a simple way to help voters make better decisions.

Politicians might think twice before sinking our country further into debt.

That’s my idea for the day. As much as I enjoy writing these posts I’ve got 2 (profitable) ventures to run…

Ben Alexander

September 2016

Disclaimer: I am not a tax professional, I only play one on television… but anything that I write about here can be confirmed by your local CPA or tax attorney.

There are 2 financial curses that weigh down folks in the American middle class.

If both earners in a 2 income family work in a typical W-2 job their greatest expense will not be their mortgage, but the wage taxes that are taken out of their weekly paycheck.

This tax rate for W-2 wage earners starts at about 25% and goes up from there based on income. The more you earn in a JOB the higher your tax rate climbs!

A business owner (or sole proprietor) earning a similar gross wage pays an average tax rate of only 13.3%. Middle class folks pay most of the income tax in this country.

Wage taxes are the FIRST CURSE of the middle class.

Most middle class people are aspirational and tend to buy homes rather than rent. The typical $200,000 home, paid for over a 30 year mortgage at a low interest rate will still COST over $400,000 in total payments.

If you own a home take out a calculator and do some simple math based on your mortgage statement. My $157,000 home will cost me $396,000 if I wait until I’m 59 years old to pay it off!

My goal is to pay off my home by next year.

In addition to mortgage interest most middle class families also pay interest on car loans, credit card balances and student loans.

Interest payments are the SECOND CURSE of the middle class!

You can’t escape taxes, and we all need a place to live, right?

———————————–

Here is my super simple idea, a way to reduce these financial curses.

Do you and your spouse both work in W-2 jobs, and your home is NOT paid off yet?

Start a modest side business, something you can get into for less than $500.

Right away your taxes will decrease because you can claim expenses like mileage, meals and your cell phone bill.

Becoming a business owner this year might save you $5K this year in taxes, or it might save you much more, talk to an accountant about your particular situation.

The tax savings ALONE will probably offset the costs of starting your new venture.

Use the new income from your side business to PAY DOWN your debt.

You’ll still have to pay taxes, but if your business deductions reduce your taxes by $10,000 per year this adds up to $100,000 per decade that you get to keep in your pocket.

If you pay off your home in 10 to 15 years instead of the usual 30 you will save another $100,000 in interest payments.

Start a business with a low cost of entry.

Grow your income in your business to $1,000 per month.

Pay off your cars, your credit cards, then your home.

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But what kind of business is low risk for a modest investment?

It can be anything from a lawn service to a consulting business to a home based direct sales business like Mary Kay or Life Leadership.

I started Balloon Distractions while I still held a full time sales job.

There are many ways you can start a small side business and grow it to profitability.

Don’t make the mistake of going into further debt to buy a franchise for $100,000. This is a mistake, especially if you still have a full time job.

It took me a few months to get my Life business up to $1,000 per month in net profit, and I’m glad that I took that leap. Anyone could do what I did, even if they worked 40 hours a week. I built my Life business on nights and weekends.

You don’t have to spend your entire life paying a big chunk of your income to the banks and the IRS, you can avoid the 2 curses of the middle class!

———————————–

The other side benefit to operating a small business is not just the tax reduction and the additional income, but the skills that you will learn in taking the leap from being an employee to becoming an entrepreneur.

I haven’t been an employee since 2003, and this has given me tremendous freedom and options that I never would have had trading time for money and working for a boss.

I hope that gives you something to think about!

Ben Alexander

August 30, 2016

In the last 2 years my wife and I have paid off over $150,000 in personal and business debt. I was first influenced by the Dave Ramsey books, but the final straw was listening to the Financial Fitness CDs from Life Leadership.

The CDs fundamentally changed our philosophy about debt, for many years my spending had been more emotional than logical. After studying the Life Leadership material I began to look at my income and debt in a radically different way.

Before the CDs I had no idea what my total debt number was, but the audio training led me to focus on our overall debt number. I started writing down our monthly debt totals. We can only change what we measure, right?

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For twenty years I would replace a perfectly fine car just because it had 130,000 miles on it, I would justify this by telling myself “It’s just a $300 per month payment, that’s better than paying for repairs.”

I used to finance $15K for a nice used car, but it seemed that I always had a car payment.

My (paid off) Toyota Avalon has over 175,000 miles on it now, but I diligently maintain it. I’m trying to drive it to 300,000 miles, but I’d be  happy to reach the 250,000 mark. This is the first time that my wife and I have 2 paid off cars in the driveway, it feels great.

My next car will be paid for CASH, probably a modest used Honda or Toyota for 6 to 7K. I don’t care if the car is a little older, just as long as the air conditioning works!

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Eating out is another budget killer.

We used to go out to eat when there was food at home in the fridge. Eating out is a budget killer. The cost of one meal in a restaurant buys you enough groceries for 3 meals at home. If we are on the road traveling we might get a sandwich at Subway, but we no longer eat out at higher-end places. Not worth it.

When our house is paid off, and we have 100K in savings we’ll eat out more, but until then we’re focused on a very specific goal.

——————————–

Another factor for us was getting rid of credit cards. Now I use either cash or a debit card. The debit card is tied to a business operations account, I know exactly how much is in that account, if I spend more than the balance I’m whacked with a $35 overage charge.

The simple elegance of this is that I can only spend cash for (less than) the total amount in my operations account, no more. This forces me to plan a little better, it also places 100% of my business expenses flowing through one account.

At the end of each month I open a spreadsheet and enter all the amounts from my operations account into an excell spreadsheet, this then goes to my CPA for our corporate taxes. Online banking is perfect for this type of thing. I use that same operations account to process monthly bonuses out to my Balloon Distractions crew, so all my business expenses are in one place.

I still save receipts and paperwork, but my accounting is vastly simplified by running all my business expenses through the same account. If I lose a receipt for an expense it is still recorded on my bank statement.

Of course, the one deduction not recorded in my bank account is mileage, for this I save the oil change receipt for all our vehicles. When I was audited by Uncle Sam back in 2007 the government challenged me on the amount of mileage we were claiming. When I produced oil change receipts the IRS no longer questioned the deduction.

There is a tremendous sense of satisfaction that I get every time I pay off another debt item. This represents action and progress towards being totally debt free.

When I was mired in debt 2 years ago it felt like I was slowly choking, now that we’ve taken action and set a plan in place I can clearly see the day when we will pay off our  home!

We will be one of the very few families in our neighborhood with a PAID OFF home!

I’m not sure of the precise date when our home will be paid off, it might be 2 years from now, or it might be three… but I will still be one of the youngest people in my neighborhood (and the youngest person in my family) to accomplish this.

The crazy thing about it is that we don’t feel like our life is that constrained or different just because we eat out less and drive older cars.

If anything my marriage is BETTER because we both have more peace of mind in regard to our finances. Having less stress improves your health and your overall quality of life.

Drive used cars.

Eat out less.

If you own a business cut up your credit cards and run your expenses on a debit card!

Go Debt free!

-Ben Alexander

August 2016

I was as broke as smoke 13 years ago.

I was 29 years old, I had just moved my family to Tampa, took a sales job that was %100 commission based… and my results were awful. Every single day was a string of NO sales, NO income and growing bills on my desk.

One night I came home from my job and my past due mortgage note was on my desk in my little home office: $1,100. Eleven hundred bucks that I did not have, with zero commissions coming in… and my wife had ZERO luck finding a teaching job.

(She did get a job as a teacher, but that was about 2 months later… our daughters were only 4 and 6 years old at the time, so we also needed to take care of our kids).

I had twisted balloon in restaurants back in 1997 and 1998… and I still had a bunch of balloons in a bag in my closet…

That night I bundled up some balloons and headed for Ybor City, the nightclub district in downtown Tampa. I twisted balloons on the street for TIPS, coming home with eighty bucks in crumpled up $1 and $5 bills…

I went back to Ybor every single night until my mortgage note was paid…

It was on the street, twisting balloons and sweating in the August heat back in 2003 that the idea for Balloon Distractions came to me. Within a few weeks I had some restaurants lined up and I started to recruit local college kids on the USF campus in Tampa.

For 13 years that Balloon Distractions has paid my mortgage, given me lotsa free time, and even got me 8 minutes of televised silliness on Shark Tank.

ALL of it came from taking action.

In those 13 years I made mistakes, I tried other ventures that were not as successful, at one point I even lost money on Super Sonic Spheres, check it out:

This was a goofy invention that I found in Taiwan and we imported a couple hundred units to the United States.

It never made a dime, but I’m glad we still have the videos on YouTube.

The best thing about the SuperSonicSphere clips are the little kids from the neighborhood that we bribed with free pizza to star in our video.

IF you never take action you’ll never fail, if you never fail you’ll never learn anything.

I’m glad that we started Balloon Distractions way back in 2003. We went on to grow teams all over the United States. Today we have clients in Seattle, Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, and many other smaller markets.

Whether you are considering Balloon Distractions for part time work as an entertainer or full time work as a Regional Leader you will learn new skills, have fun, and earn some great money.

Ben Alexander

Founder, BalloonDistractions.com

August / 2016

About a month ago I shut off my cable (saving about $80 per month) and got into the habit of reading each night instead of watching junk saved to my DVR.

Currently I’m going through Orrin Woodward’s Resolved book. I glossed over the book 2 years ago, now I’m actually reading it with my full attention. Resolved is on par with some of the greatest success tomes out there, such as The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson and See you at the TOP by the late Zig Ziglar.

I’m also reading Constantine Menge’s book; China, The Gathering Threat.

Getting off the TV habit felt really weird at first, like I had cut off my foot or lost one of my five senses. I felt like there was a hole in my life, and for a few days I really hated it. I just wanted to turn on the TV and turn off my brain, that was my nightly pattern.

I’ve been watching TV every day of my life since I was a toddler, it was always there with a seductive glow and endless content. TV was a habit that set up shop in my brain over 4 decades ago… I shudder to think how many hours I’ve wasted watching nothing.

I’m not proud of this, but one of my serious TV addictions (since college) has been all the versions of Law and Order; Law and Order SVU, Law and Order Major Case, Law and Order Preschool edition, Law and Order Southern Cooking Recipes, Law and Order PTSD, Law and Order Animal Planet, and so on.

With DVR technology you can now record and watch every episode and variation of Law and Order. You can get to know Olivia Benson better than you know your own family! You can get freaked out by the general weirdness and dysfunction of Robert Goren.

Law and Order reruns are now in syndication on second tier TV networks, at one point my DVR was recording episodes on three different channels! You can turn on your TV anytime, almost anywhere on the planet and watch Lennie Brisco solve a murder, even though the actor who played Lennie died back in 2004!

Rest in Peace, Jerry Orbach.

For the last 2 decades I’ve been giving myself a nightly dose of lies, rape, murder and conspiracy. The Law and Order storylines are fascinating to the human mind because they shine a spotlight on awful crimes, stuff that we never see in our everyday lives.

This was the junk that I was putting in my mind each night before falling asleep.

I was letting heinous crimes cycle through my brain all night long!

When I started to read instead of watching TV 2 things happened right away:

1. I fell asleep faster, instead of being kept awake by the flickering lights of the TV screen.
2. I began filling my mind with positive concepts, so when I woke up each morning I had a better attitude, more optimism, and more HOPE for the future.

My purpose in life is to build a business that transforms the lives of 10,000 people, in order to do that I have to become the type of leader that other leaders will follow. I’ve found a higher calling, and addictive TV watching has been holding me back!

There are some who might question my strategy, some who might say that reading is boring. “What will I do without TV?”.

Do you want to do something significant in your life or merely go through the motions?

You can live a mediocre life, work your job, pay the bills and just watch TV every night… millions of people do exactly that.

But WHAT IF you were built for a larger role?

What if you could do something positive that impacts the lives of 10,000 families?

Did God design you to be average?

Perhaps (in my case) I was born to just be an average Joe, and I’m striving for the impossible. Maybe my grand notions are merely a delusion!

Maybe I was born to start a balloon company and just own a small business for the rest of my life.

I’m running the risk that I’m an average guy and that all my hopes and dreams are total bull honkey, I’m taking the risk that all this reading and work is for nothing!

BUT… the more I read the more I’m convinced that anyone can live a BIG life and achieve huge goals, as long as they are willing to do the work (in the right opportunity), study the right material and never give up.

I would rather look back when I’m 90 and KNOW that I went for the big time, the brass ring…. fame and fortune!

I would rather read, grow, and explore my upper potential by trying to build a massive business with Life Leadership. If I don’t try to do that I will always regret it.

Let me be crystal clear, Life Leadership is not the only vehicle out there, there are many ways to make a big impact and change the world. As you begin to read the right books and educate yourself you will learn about everyone from Jonas Salk to Mohatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. to Marcus Aurelius to Jesus of Nazareth.

When you read about people who did GREAT things you are far more likely to accomplish big things in your own life. Elevate your thinking, it will elevate your destiny.

Turning off the TV and reading MORE is my daily preparation for whatever lies ahead, this is my mental boot camp to whip me into shape for a much larger leadership role.

Discard the bad habits that are holding you back, to allow room for great habits that propel you forward!

-Ben Alexander

August 6, 2016

PS. If you’ve never heard of Jonas Salk or Marcus Aurelius this is a sign that you need to read more and read deeper.

PPS. If you’ve never heard of Mohatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. or Jesus of Nazareth I don’t know how to help you at this point…