How we are achieving our dreams and how we can help you with yours

Hello and thank you for taking time to visit our website. My name is Raúl Gonzalez and I'm married to Adriana.

We hope that through sharing our personal experiences with you and demonstrating how Financial Planning InfoGuide.com was created to help you with the challenges of living a balanced life, becoming independent and improving your standard of living, that you'll grow to trust us.

Achieving a balance in life is a challenge, but it's not impossible

Both my wife and I are CPA's and Adriana has a Master's Degree in Finance.  We both began our professional careers with a well known international accounting firm: PricewaterhouseCoopers. The work was hard and exacting as I've remarked elsewhere: our jobs had a starting time but no stopping time and we worked weekends too.  Our busy season was 9 or 10 months per year.

As you can imagine our lives had no balance and I see that these days this is a common problem, at least from what I noticed in our company's clients.  If you might be experiencing the same, I can assure you you're not alone.  So, with this in mind...

The solution is not to resign but review your dreams and goals and see if what you're doing will lead to where you want to go

It is hard to keep up the constant rush and so, after several years of doing it, I decided to I analyze my situation, put my priorities in order, clearly established what I wanted for the future, took a deep breath and handed in my resignation.  What an experience!  I never thought I'd have the courage to do it...

This was not an easy decision especially because I have debts and bills to pay and if I had stuck it out I was likely to be a manager in a couple of years more.

I liked my work, in fact a great deal of my experience came from that job, but I realized that the longer I stayed the more difficult it would be for me to leave my career.  On the other hand, I had two main reasons for resigning:

1. I had no time available to pursue my own projects and
2. My job was not teaching me (in fact it was blocking me) from what I really wanted: to own my own business.

Fortunately I found work with a venture capital firm.  Now I have more time to develop my own projects and I'm constantly learning about businesses and entrepreneurs.

The importance of financial planning in your life and business

Before resigning I started developing a serious relationship with Adriana and so when I changed jobs (and following several serious discussions) we started to talk about getting married.

We quickly reached the topic of how we were going to achieve what we wanted and dreamed about.  We knew that we needed life insurance, we wanted to invest, buy a home, etc.  But we didn't have an idea of where to start ...

And so, after sifting through mountains of information, we realized the importance of financial planning. We studied and developed our own plan and, in doing so, realized that there are many aspects of finances which can have a dramatic impact on your life but are often over looked.

Unfortunately, in my area, there still are no certified financial planners, otherwise we might have developed our plan and put it into effect a lot earlier.

Now we know what we have to do and we can go forward with faith and the confidence that each step we will take will carry us closer to our dreams and goals.

From another viewpoint, planning your personal finances is also important for your business and is a fault I constantly see in the risk capital projects I deal with.  For example, I've analyzed cases in which a business owner was not managing his own funds well and this was affecting his business.

The problems of mixing your own money with that of your business, or not knowing certain basic aspects of finance can threaten your business even to the point of bankruptcy.

Experiences based on trial and error in business can teach you valuable lessons

Over time I've had various experiences with business projects which were not successful but which taught me important lessons.  I've participated in and developed projects such as:

• A non-government organization dedicated to microleasing
• a pawn shop
• Multi Level Marketing (MLM) with nutrition products
• Internet business plans  (eBay, affiliate marketing, etc.)

The main lessons I learned were:

1. It is necessary to organize your personal finances to understand what your present situation is, clearly establish what you want, what are your goals (it's not as simple as it seems) and how to reach them (an action plan).
2. If you determine that your plan involves starting a business, this will succeed to the extent that you:
   • dedicate sufficient time,
   • base your plan on a firm mission of service to others and
   • adequately cover all the technical and legal aspects that your business requires.

The dilemma of having enough time and knowing what business to start

The most difficult areas for me were that of being able to dedicate sufficient time to my business, and also deciding what kind of business to start.

Even though my new job gave me much greater flexibility in time, I still was limited to a few hours a day to start my business and make it work so the first conclusion I arrived at was that I had to start a business which I could run from my own home and that one of the best possibilities would be an internet based business although I had no experience in this field.

Then I had to define what kind of business to start.  As I mentioned earlier, my wife and I have considerable experience in finances, it is an area which we both like and even more so where it applies to personal finances and the entrepreneurial spirit.  So, ideally our business would be related to this, but how would we begin?

After considerable searching, I discovered Site Build It! (SBI) which taught me how to turn a hobby, a passion or any skill you have into a profitable business with a web site and from this Financial Planning InfoGuide.com was born.

Does that seem hard?  Not at all. This website was created using SBI and I knew nothing about the internet or building web pages when I began.   If I could do it, anyone can!

The key is that SBI teaches you how to build a real business because you begin investing the time and effort that you'd put into a traditional bricks 'n mortar business, which I can testify to from the experience I have in the risk capital field. For this reason we've included more detailed reviews about SBI.

If you'd like to know how SBI works, you can  Take a Video Tour or view this Quick tour if you're on dial up or a slow connection.

How can we help you make your dreams a reality...

This very day, as I write this page we are well underway with our plan.  As you can tell we've had our ups and downs, doubts, fear, sweat and tears, but your story doesn't have to be the same, it's enough that you plot your own course and for that...

When we created Financial Planning InfoGuide, we did it with the mission of guiding people like you who dare to pursue their dreams and for that reason, we present reliable information which will help you know the options you have and allow you to make the best decisions for your life.

If you'd like to contact us, please use this link.

Thank you for visiting and I wish you all the best.

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