Best practice for wealth learn and priactice a 'financially valued" skill

He saw my point. I gave him a quick rundown of an idea we've talked about often in ETR - that the best way to make good money and keep making good money (i.e., keep your job) is to learn and practice a "financially valued" skill. It doesn't matter what skill you choose to develop, so long as it's one that will make it easy for you to eventually charge $100 an hour for your time.

The best way to get rich is to own your own business and invest in real estate. But the best way to avoid penury - now and, more important, when you reach "retirement" age - is to be very good at doing something that people will pay good money for.

A hundred dollars an hour is a good minimum number to shoot for. If you worked 50 hours a week at that rate, you'd be making $250,000 a year. Yes, you can make a lot more money than a quarter million bucks a year if you have your own successful business, but in terms of having a reliably high income (one you can earn regardless of how old you are or where you choose to live), having a financially valued skill is the way to go. You can even retire and work on a very-part-time basis... and still have a good income to live on.

Here's a short list of financially valued skills:
knowing how to market
being able to sell
being capable of creating a positive bottom line Those are the premium skills, the ones that - combined with being able to work well with people - will put you at the very top of almost any organization and assure your employment for pretty much as long as you want it.

But there are other, less-valued but still valuable, skills - and I reminded Bruce that he has one: developing information technology.

"That's a liability," he told me. "All the good tech jobs are in India. First, the entry-level jobs - the data-input and basic programming jobs - went. Then, the middle-level jobs. Now, even jobs at the top level are over there. American technicians just can't compete."

I thought of my eldest son, who, despite my warnings, got his degree in computer programming. He recently got his first real job, working for a company in L.A. that does special effects for movies. And I'm sure his bosses love him. But he's a technician - and, from a business point of view, a technician is a necessary expense, not a vital asset.

"Even the most qualified engineer," I told my son, "is viewed by the CEO and shareholders as a cost of doing business. He may be providing a very necessary function in a highly skilled way - but until he can find a way to position himself on the profit side of the ledger, there will always be the risk that he can be replaced by someone cheaper."

The situation that Bruce is in right now proves that point.

Bruce is too strong, too smart, too gifted a person not to be able to find a good job. But in order to do that, he's going to have to make some changes. Instead of continuing to search for a high-paying position where he can "work with people," he's going to have to perfect (maybe even learn from scratch) a financially valued skill. When he sends out his next resume or has his next interview, he'll have to be able to answer one or several of the following questions:

"How will you increase our revenues?"
"How will you reduce our costs?"
"How will you expand our customer base?"
"How will you increase our profits?"
Bruce can make the transition. I hope he does.