It
is a common saying among
gamblers and businessmen that money begets money or so to speak,
you’ve got to have money to make money. The Internet Marketing experts
will tell you that nothing is “actually” free although they lure you
into their games with excessive use of the word FREE. But it’s
true.—You’ve got to have money to make more money.
Take
a look at this. You want to do business in the Internet. To go to the
Internet, you need a computer and to have the computer you need to have
the money to buy it. After
the computer is purchased, whether you make money or not is another
story.
For
anything or any business idea that you conceive, you will need a start
up capital to get it off the ground and get things going, before it can
bring you anything in profits. Yes, you need the money to make more
money. But it doesn’t have to be your own. That’s what we are
talking about – OPM.
If
you have but little of your own, you can use other people's.
The
technique of using other people's money is so common and so well thought
of among the very rich that it has been dignified with capital initials.
Other People's Money: OPM for short. Most of the men you're meeting in
this golden chamber have used OPM at one time or another in their lives.
Many of them used it in the very beginning to lift themselves out of
poverty or lowly employee status, to launch themselves on the first mile
of the long, hard climb. You'll find OPM cropping up again and again, in
various forms and with various applications, as we move around
the room. But the man who best illustrates the technique is the
man we're now about to meet, one of the very, very richest of the rich,
Daniel Keith Ludwig.
Ludwig
began as an ordinary paycheck earner like you and me. He ended with a
fortune that has been estimated as high as $3 billion. Other
calculations put him in the neighborhood of $1 billion. (Somehow there
doesn't seem to be much difference between the two figures. Both make
the mind reel.) He did it mainly by using OPM.
The
disadvantage of OPM, of
course, is that it involves a greater degree of risk. If the business
doesn’t turn out right or the economy turns around while you're in the
midst of your gambit, the OPM route leaves you saddled with a burden of
debt. Either you carry this debt until the market improves, or you sell
out at a loss. With cash you escape this kind of problem. But as we've
already noted and will note many more times in this book, it is
virtually impossible to grow rich without taking risks.
The
stock market's so-called margin-system is another familiar illustration
of the use of OPM. Under certain conditions, in buying listed stocks,
you're allowed to borrow part of the purchase price from your broker.
The stock market's margin rules are strict, and not for decades, has it
been legal to borrow as big a percentage of a stock's price as you can
borrow to buy real estate. Still, millions of investors habitually buy
on margin. They obviously believe even a little OPM is better than none.
And
we found one indisputable example of this accepted
business principle.
Here
is his story