Financial expert, Author and national Motivational Speaker, Paul D. Jones, visits INterrupted Blogs for a brief tête-à-tête.
Jones, newest book, “I Quit (Being Broke)" is set for release early this spring. The manuscript is a spin-off from his last self-help narratives entitled, “Who Told You… You Were Broke,” “Schedule for Success,” and “What You and Your Kids Need to Know about Credit.”
Although Jones is a phenomenal author, this is the smallest quantum from his list of accomplishments. Jones is a inspirational speaker, corporate trainer, keynote speaker, and conference headliner. His current and successful endeavors include, "JMG Companies," and "JMG Net-Worth," in addition to his self-help websites, “Mycreditisbetter.com," "Bodyworth.com (Food)," and "Netsalesworth.com."
Jones is the most watched philanthropist in is his trade, and because of his methods during tours, and financial lectures, participants gravitate to him with an extreme keenness to learn more about safe financial practices.
"Financial City University" is one of Jones newest and most talked about interactive sessions. Jones uses the half-day courses to teach, credit, business ownership, budgeting, leveraging a business into growth, and real state. The modules theme, “Think Big by Understanding Little, “ has attracted participants from high-school to middle-aged-adults—they have implemented instructions from these courses and have improved tremendously in the areas of finance and lifestyle change.
Jones was featured on Soultrain.com, Ebony Magazine, Movers and Shakers Magazine, just to note a few sources.
INterrupted was delighted to be in that number with other media outlets. We were able to grab a handful of Jones sobering words, to share with our readers, who may need just a little recommendation from someone who experienced the hardships, and is now able to instruct others on how to overcome, as well as avoid financial distress all together by following the principals from his book.
Q. So tell me about your latest release, “I Quit”
"I quit," is a book that I wrote basically from working in the sales industry and consulting people. My other titles, “Who Told You… You Were Broke” and “Schedule for Success”—you get to a point where you hear people saying, “Well, I was doing this and it just wasn’t happening fast enough so I quit.” You’ll hear someone say, “I tried this and I quit. I tried that and I quit.” So, I’d say, “Yeah, there are so many people who became successful from the same thing that they quit on, and that just wasn’t making sense.” I just realized and I was just cracking a joke—well, it wasn’t really a joke.
I said, “If I quit anything, I’m gonna quit being broke.” The minute I said it, it was in a room filled with over one-hundred people, they just hit the floor. So, really, it’s a book that offers solutions to mental mistakes that people make daily.
They’re going to make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. But what happens is when you don’t have your purpose, dreams, and your vision—I always tell people, “You gotta have a plan.” The plan is, 'If you want to buy a home, but you want to buy a car, you need to know what it takes."
There’s an aspect of financial literacy that must matter to you, and it means that you try and pay as much as you can in cash for it. Now, if you look at trying to make a living, everything seems to matter a little more. If you work 9-5, that’s fine. The difference in your life is what you do from 5-9. When I say that quit being broke is a mental thing and not a financial thing, because once you get into the mindset that you want to accomplish something, you’ll start getting your resources.
Q. You mentioned that a person shouldn’t burn bridges. Maybe, burning a bridge, is something that you need to do….
It’s always better to walk off with your head up, even if you’re in a disagreement and move on with your life. You, never know, who knows whom. I’m not telling a person to stay in a bad relationship. What I’m really saying is, make sure that when the bridge gets burned, be sure that you aren’t the reason for it being burned. That’s character…
Q. What is one of the biggest mistakes that you’ve seen in making the wrong decisions with regards to credit? Well, the biggest one for me, because I can only speak for myself, is school debt. By not paying for school loans right away, when I went to buy my first home, they told me, “No”, because of a term called debt to income ratio. The debt was credit card debts from school and school loans. There are laws that protect the consumers from creditors; however, if you get into financial ruin, and if something happens and you want to file bankruptcy, that school loan is not attached to that.
They can take your social security check. If you have a fifty-thousand dollar loan for a class that you took, thirty-years later, that fifty-thousand-dollars is now one-hundred-thousand, plus. I would say that the biggest mistake that people make is that they don’t pay it off fast enough.
I’m not saying don’t get a school loan, I’m saying, pay that thing off as fast as possible. Once you have that paid off, the next thing is building wealth, along with building credit. Have low debt, with the lowest interest, if you need debt at all. Have your debt so low that you can focus on your dollars going towards some form of interest, that’s growing for you and not interest taken away.
Q. Did you attend school for finance? No. I got sick and tired of being financially stressed and broke. If you beat me at something, I’m going to turn into an information geek. I started my own business in 1997. 3 years later, I made one-million-dollars. From 2000 to 2003, I had loaned one-million-dollars. I still had big money coming in, and that’s when it hit me… “What did I do with over a half-a-million- dollars?” just to give an example… I had friends calling me asking to borrow money, friends calling wanting me to invest in their businesses(that never got off the ground), me wanting to show people that I had money, so I was overspending in many areas, and it caused me to hit rock bottom(and then you get to see who your true friends are).
So, in that, I went back and got my producer license to be able to market Roth IRA’s, and financial things. Now, I don’t market it today. I just went back and got the information, studied, and took classes. I became a financial instructor because I wanted to learn everything that I needed to know about financial literacy.
Q. Have you had a lot of success with your books? That’s why I’m here. Yes, I wrote the books in the mindset that my daughter would read it. “Who Told You… You Were Broke”, was my basic journal to my daughter. It was based on the concept from the bible, when Adam and Eve were in the garden and they were naked… God asked, “Who told you, you were naked? You are the same as I always made you.”
Q. As somewhat a financial adviser, do you think that the economy will survive another 5 years with the way that it is? History tells us, “Yes,” without a doubt. The difference is, who is going to gain who is not going to gain. There is going to be a separation of wealth and it will continue to grow. So, people need to start understanding. If the job is not going to pay more money, that’s fine. Work the job, be happy, and treat the boss with respect--it’s your choice. But start something on the side anyway. Start a home-based business. Do that, and get something going, that will help leverage you on another level.
Q. Let’s talk about legacy… Do you think that you’ve done all that you need to do as far as leaving your legacy. What more can we expect from you? Obviously, there’s a lot more within me. When I speak on legacy, I want to make sure that I’m helping others to create legacies for themselves, and that’s why we created the company, "mycreditisbetter.com," so that people will understand, it’s not about credit repair, it’s about credit care.
We got to understand that while building a legacy, there are things that’s going to happen to character. You gotta understand the whole thing. To get a job today, they are going to check your credit. In order to get help with your kids sporting event, they are going to do a background on you, and that consists of credit. They are going to check your credit. It’s not all about getting financed for credit, they are going to check your credit just because. Credit is very huge.
At the end of the day, I want my son, and I want my daughter—I want them to look back before they put the dirt over my body, which will be several years from now because I’m still a young guy. I want them to have something that they are proud of, and they say, “You know what, I learned this from my dad,—I didn’t have that privilege.”
I didn’t have that privilege growing up, and other kids didn’t like me growing up… I lived with a single mom. There were mentors then… I’m a mentor. We just mentor people to say, “Hey, I’ve been there before. I’m that guy that didn’t have a dad. I’m that guy who came from a single family with a mother, and all the stereotypes that they said a young black man would go through, I beat them. So, I want to teach everyone else to do the same. It’s not about me. It’s about them…
For more information, you can visit amazon.com to grab his books, or www.PaulDJones.com, www.jmgnetwirth.com, as well as Facebook, QuitBeingBroke.