I’m not sure if I’ve been out of it for a while and this is old news or if this is something new, but I just had an unusual experience that I can’t believe I almost got trapped with.

You know how scammers send “phishing” emails to try to get your personal information, right? They send you an email that looks like it is from PayPal or Bank of America about how there is suspicious activity on your account and you must log in immediately. You click the link and it takes to you a site that looks identical to PayPal, so you proceed to log in and the next day you realize you’ve just fallen victim to a scam.

The email you received was not from PayPal and either was the website you submitted your information. If you username and password is the same as your other accounts, the scammer now not only can deplete your PayPal account, but they now have access to your email, any personal information you may have in there, and other private/financial accounts.

Once they’re in your email, they change the password so you’re locked out, but they have full access to your account. So they figure they’ll have some fun and email all your friends and tell them you’re in desperate need for $500 and to send it to X PayPal account. So now they’ve stolen your money as well as your friends and family.

That’s nothing new… but what I just experienced caught me off guard.

I received a text message that read:

From: Name of my bank
Message: Due to unusual activity, your account has been closed. Please call us at 555-555-5555

Without hesitation, I clicked the button on my phone that automatically dials the number listed in the text message. It’s a nice, one-click feature that makes it easy for people to mindlessly make a phone call. But what I heard was quite an interesting message:

This is a message from the Federal Trade Commission. This number has been disconnected because it may be involved in a scam. You may have  received a message by email or text message to call this number about your account. No matter how real it seems, that message was a trick.

Yikes! I’m curious what would have happened before the FTC shut these guys down. Would someone have answered asking for my Social Security Number and bank information to verify my account?

It’s quite scary how creative and smart these scammers can get, but it’s good to know that it doesn’t take long for them to get caught. Unfortunately, they’ll probably be right at it again.

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Any time an investment, business, or strategy is being evaluated, one of the elements to consider is the velocity of money. This is a methodology that many real estate investors use to determine whether or not an investment property is worth their time or not, but it applies in virtually any wealth building strategy.

The velocity of money is essentially how quickly money is spent, but to an investor it means how quickly the money can be retrieved.  People with cash often ask, “what is the best place to invest to make the most amount of money?” The answer may be the opportunity that a risk and reward measure that you are comfortable with, and allows you to get your money back as quickly as possible.

Using real estate as an example… let’s say you have $50,000 in investment capital, and you are evaluating three investment opportunities. For the sake of arguments, we’ll pretend they all offer equal amounts of risk and reward.

• Property A that you can immediately sell for a profit
• Property B that you can use down payment money and college $500 in cash flow from rental income
• Property C that is expected to appreciate at a rapid rate over the next 5 years

These might all be good investments, but once your investment capital is gone, you can’t invest in anything else until you retrieve your money. Let’s say in each of the scenarios above, you will make $10,000 off of the deal. With Property A, you can quickly get your money back in order to put it into another investment, whereas Property C may take 5 years to get your money back. Strategy A allows you to make $10,000 over and over again in a relatively short period of time, where as the other options with a lower velocity of money do not offer that benefit.

This concept does not just pertain to real estate. While a shorter/quicker velocity of money may increase risk, particularly when dealing with the stock market, but it doesn’t necessarily have to increase risk. For entrepreneurs, there are businesses that require the same up-front investment but significantly differ when you consider how quickly you can make back your investment in order to start another business.

If your strategy is to make money, rather than stash your cash and produce a passive income, velocity of money is an important concept to consider. Those thinkg about starting a new business or rethinking their current model should also consider how fast the business cycle is. Cyclical businesses that require big upfront investments only to see the pay off one or two times a year, for example, may face challenges that businesses with shorter business cycles don’t necessarily face.

By definition, an entrepreneur is, “someone who organizes a business venture and assumes the risk for it.” Likewise, someone who is entrepreneurial is someone who can measure risk and reward and use innovation in order to profit or gain.

So at what point does someone actually become an entrepreneur? In order to label yourself (or be labled) as an entrepreneur, do you have to start a certain number of businesses? Are you an entrepreneur if…

• You Sell Something on eBay?
• You Do Snow Removal for a Few Bucks for Your Neighbor?
• You Drive Your Co-Workers to Work for a Few Bucks?

At what point do you actually become an entrepreneur and can consider yourself an expert at starting business ventures and profitting from them?

In my opinion (coming from someone without the credentials to give one), an entrepreneur knows they are an entrepreneur not because of what they have accomplished. The ability to see an opportunity, get excited about the opportunity, organize all the parts in order to take advantage of the opportunity, making it not only work but scale that business up in a way that becomes self-sufficient, and then do it all over again is something that is inherent. You not only have the ability to do this, but you love to do this. Therefore, I believe, that an entrepreneur is not measured by what you accomplished, but how you behave and think.

You can train to become an entrepreneur and certainly become better at it, but for the most part I believe people are born with an entrepreneurial mind — or at least they were conditioned to become that way.

So what do you think? Are entrepreneurs born or are they made?