Family Financial Freedom

By Wendy Kirkland and Patrick Kirkland

Family Financial Freedom

I have been wondering something for a while. In the current fragile economy, when so many people are looking for their next step and desperately needing a way to make ends meet financially, seeking advice, money-making strategies, and how-to information, how is it that no one has writte

• Language: English
• Publisher: TradeWins Publishing
• Release date: Jun 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087924625

Book preview

Family Financial Freedom:

What to Do If You Weren't Born Rich

by

Wendy Kirkland

and

Patrick Kirkland

Copyright © 2014 by Wendy Kirkland & Patrick Kirkland

All right reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed

In any printed or electronic form without permission.

Table of Contents

Out of the Ashes

I Became Obsessed!

Positive Personal Money Management

15 Successful-Future Management Skills

Investing - The Bottom Line

The Journey Begins

The Market- A Living Entity?

Stocks = A Share of the Action

Bullish or Bearish

Leverage- the Accelerated Growth Aspect of Option Trading

Calls and Puts- The Two Types of Options:

Trade the Trend- Up or Down?

Trade Expectations

Option Premiums

Which Stock Option Should I Buy?

Wall Street and Risk

Watch the Big Players

Emotional Responses to Trading

Trading Personalities

Greed- The Seed of Discontent

Special Secret to Control Greed

Understanding Risk

Trading Confidence

Various Types of Equities

What are the advantages of ETFs and Indexes?

What's the Big Deal with Stock Options?

Chart Reading – Our Most Valuable Tool

Charts Create a Picture of Price

Candlestick Stories

Trend Trading

Trend Channels

Let's step back for a moment.

Divine Influence

The Divine Proportion – Fibonacci Principle

Exponential Moving Averages—EMAs

Fibonacci Pivot Points

Commodity Channel Index (CCI)

Overbought and Oversold

Divergence = Difference or Disagreement

Average Directional Index or ADX

Average True Range (ATR)

Setting Up Your Charts

Trade Candidates

FFF Strategy Guidelines

Strategy Guideline Recap

Step by Step Trade Process

Stop Loss

Setting Up A Trade Account

Fine Tuning Purchase Prices: Market or Limit Orders

You have all the Pieces Needed for Success

Family Financial Freedom

I have been wondering something for a while. In the current fragile economy, when so many people are looking for their next step and desperately needing a way to make ends meet financially, seeking advice, money-making strategies, and how-to information, how is it that no one has written a book like this one you now hold in your hands?

I believe this exact moment constitutes the greatest financial opportunity in history and is a small part of a natural and logical development of our economy. People have a great financial need right now, especially inexperienced young people -- they need guidance and mentoring but their mentor's own financial needs, can make it difficult to be positive while instructing and being a good example for those in their care. A parent, teacher, or mentor is much more likely to unconsciously stifle those they love with their ingrained and limiting beliefs around financial need.

These words may sound surreal to you. Our aim in this book is to teach you about the stock market, option trading and give you a positive mindset along the way. We make these three presentations to you in such a concrete, rational and implementable way so you will take action. We will give the tools to start inspiring and instructing others on how to succeed in life and move towards the ultimate goal of financial independence.

(I, Wendy, speak in general terms and Patrick will speak to the young people with whom you share this book.) 

Out of the Ashes

When the car slid to a stop, I was screaming, Get out of the car, Jack. Get out of the car! We have to save what we can.

I looked over from my seat on the passenger side. Jack was scrunched between the crevice of the steering wheel and the open door. One foot on the floorboard and the other dangling in the empty space of the open door as he tried to wrestle his way out without stepping into the water that I could still hear lapping underneath the car.

We had rounded the corner of the street and pulled into the parking lot of the bank located behind our gift store for the 7,084th time. The car knew the way and the road had ruts from our twice daily trek, seven days a week for nearly 20 years.

The ride to work that day became a turning point in our lives.

It eventually became a blessing. For years I had been depressed and emotionally disconnected from our retail business. Don't get me wrong, there were enjoyable aspects: locating interesting gifts we thought customers would like, designing creative displays and visiting with customers. But even that wore you down.  The mantra of the tourist: Oh, they have this at Olsen's back home. Can you believe how expensive this is? Take a picture and I will make you one.  Over the years we came to realize that for the most part, we were just a part of the tour after people visited the Biltmore House in Asheville, NC. 

The store had its share of sales among the other 20 or so retail shops in the area. For years, it provided us with just enough to cover our personal and the store's expenses. Though on occasion, we were forced to ask our suppliers to give us a little more time on the bills. I was 57 years old, but I felt adrift as if my life were over, or over to the extent of experiencing anything new.  One day was a repeat of the last.  We were literally living the Groundhog Day movie; every day was the same and we were not making any progress.

We raised three children and put off our retirement account in lieu of more immediate and pressing needs like college expenses, weddings, down payments on houses and periodic loans.  We were locked in by our business experience, expenses, and modest life-style with no way to expand. Our days and weeks were spoken for. 

In nearly 20 years, Jack and I had not taken a vacation or day off except for the 4 official days that a retail shop can close without letting hard earned money slip through their fingers: Christmas, New Year's Day, Easter and Thanksgiving.  It is a long span between the April and November holidays.

On the slow days, either Jack or I worked alone and on the busier days, we were both there, selling, cleaning, ordering merchandise, doing books, setting up displays and doing maintenance on the 110-year-old Victorian building.

So there I was looking out the bedroom window at home as I applied make-up, dried my hair and styled it before heading out to work.  The rain poured over the eaves, spilling over the top of the gutters. I wondered if it had rained all night and recalled hearing that Hurricane Frances, now Tropical Storm Frances was moving up from the Gulf of Mexico and through a slot between Alabama and Georgia. 

As a teenager I was raised in Jacksonville, FL and I remembered putting masking tape on the windows when there was a threat of a hurricane.  That morning, looking out through the bedroom window, I smiled as I recalled the great effort that had to be put forth when the tape was left to bake on the window glass. Might as well leave it on for the season, my mother had said with what seemed like reasonable logic. No sense going through this again if there's another storm.

The reasoning seemed logical until the oldest 5 children took turns for weeks, using razor blades to scrape off the tape little shreds at a time. 

A mist of hairspray, a dab of lipstick and we were out the door precisely at 8:30 AM, an hour and a half before we were to flip the open sign.  Jack held a wide umbrella that sheltered us both, helped me into the passenger side and then scooted around to drive.

The twenty-minute trip to the store was unremarkable.  I remembered thinking that the heavy rain would keep customers away and in an odd way, I was thankful.  The quiet would afford me the opportunity to pay bills with the funds from weekend sales and allow me the time to make a couple phone calls.

Jack turned up the radio. Tom Cochrane's "Life is a Highway" was blaring. As we sped down the highway, flanked by a spray of water pressed away by the tires and with humid air funneling through the car, I felt a reprieve from my dread of yet another day that differed little from yesterday. The heaviness of my self-pity and sorrow over a rigid, uneventful life diminished at the speed of sound as I closed my eyes and the lyrics swirled over me.

Sometimes you bend sometimes you stand

Sometimes you turn your back to the wind

There's a world outside every darkened Door

Where blues won't haunt you anymore

Then Jack hissed in a manner that in forty years I had never heard before. Damn! Wendy, hold on.

I opened my eyes as the car slid to a stop and I tried to make sense of what I was seeing between the flap, flap, flap of the windshield wipers.

The bank's parking lot was as close as we could get to the back of our shop. The five feet of water that surrounded our building tapered to ten inches or so in the raised paved area where the car had come to a stop.  I screamed irrational demands at him and we both flew from the car.  The rain came down so hard I had to place a hand over my eyes to see.

We live in the mountains of North Carolina.  It doesn't flood in the mountains.  Who ever heard of such a thing? 

Jack held me back as I took a step forward into deepening water. You can't go in there. Not yet. There's nothing we can do.

I thought, God, I am not ready yet.  I did not feel I was ready to let go of the store.  Sure I could dread the monotony, maybe even hate going to work, but that misery was self-created. The shop was ours. It was all we had. I did not feel it had fully served its purpose. It was supposed to take care of us, provide our livelihood until we were ready to release it by a conscious choice to sell when we were prepared to retire.

It's odd how real and lasting that feeling was. The slow-motion sense created by emergency was in full effect as water lapped around our feet and what appeared to be a dirty diaper neatly tucked into a packet bobbed against the back door of the shop. 

Water. Sludge. Oil residue. Sewage. Mud. Trash from who knows where filled the streets, yard and inside of the building. Everything we had worked for - merchandise, fixtures, equipment from our ice cream shop in the backyard, supplies, displays, paperwork, receipts, catalogs, furniture, cash register, credit card machine, computer - our sweat equity. What we hoped would one day be our retirement was ruined; unsalvageable. 

We had no flood insurance.  After all, it doesn't flood in the mountains. There were no financial reserves. All our resources were tied up in the shop and its merchandise.

The water eventually receded. We tossed damaged quilts, broken glass-art, stationary, books, and artwork into a dumpster out back and mucked out the shop.  They called it a hundred-year flood.  A rare occurrence.

Ten days later Tropical Storm Ivan hit us. Streams that were still overflowing from Frances quickly filled the streets and poured into buildings that were gutted but had not even started to dry out.  How could there be another hundred-year storm?

We cried from exhaustion and hosed out the building a second time. The fact that the building was now empty made it no easier to accept. I told myself that it was just stuff, not our personal possessions, but nonetheless, we were devastated with nowhere to turn.

The only positive take-away was that we were set weather-wise for 200 years.

........

This was not the end of the story, but only the beginning. I didn't know such wonders could come out of disaster. Frankly, I wouldn't have believed it if someone had told me.

We lost displays, everything saleable and still owed bills for some of the discarded merchandise.  There was no insurance. No unemployment. Who would hire Jack and I and pay more than minimum wage? 

Then without warning life turn me inside-out, redefined who I thought I was at age 57.

It changed not only who I was as a wage-earner and a business partner, but it went deeper than that. I evolved on the inside. My thinking changed. I became a better wife and mother.

I felt lifted from the mundane bondage of my self-created life and became deeply connected with my surroundings. There was an understanding, a fullness, yet a nothingness of silence for a long moment that I will never forget.  And then, slowly I discovered a feeling of being centered.

I was not having some odd out-of-body experience; in fact, I never felt more connected to who I was physically.

I felt a steadiness of mind, and a sense of gratitude washed over me, an appreciation for

Reviews for Family Financial Freedom

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