Rags to richest 2015: Billionaires despite the odds -By Keren Blankfeld

Entertainer and producer Oprah Winfrey arrives to introduce a clip from her Best Feature nominated film "Selma"

Most of the world's wealthiest people work hard to earn their bread. In fact, two thirds of this year's 1,826 billionaires are self-made. While many of these entrepreneurial moguls had some advantages to start with -- a family business, an Ivy league education or seed money -- some succeeded in spite of the starkest odds.

Mohed Altrad is a case in point. Altrad lived through his father’s abuse, his mother’s death when he was 4, and his grandmother’s banning him from school. An orphaned Bedouin, he lived on just one meal a day when he first moved to France almost five decades ago. Today he heads one of the world's leading manufacturers of scaffolding and cement mixers, with revenues exceeding $1 billion. "I knew I was condemned and my only chance was at school," Altrad told FORBES reporter Katia Savchuk this February.

Around the world, several billionaires gave up some of their childhood and began working early out of necessity. Asia's wealthiest person, Li Ka-shing, for instance, was forced to quit school at age 12 to help support his family after his father died of tuberculosis. In Italy, eye wear mogul Leonardo Del Vecchio was sent to a Milan orphanage when he was 7 -- his widowed mother couldn’t support him -- and began an apprenticeship in an eyeglass factory at age 14. His empire today includes Sunglass Hut, LensCrafters, Ray-Ban and Oakley.

In the U.S., several billionaires show that the American Dream can be a reality for just about anyone, whether you’re an immigrant on welfare (see WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum), you’ve been homeless (see John Paul Mitchell System’s John Paul DeJoria) or a war vet (see Dole's David Murdock).
Following are  FORBES’ 10 picks for the best tales of rags to riches billionaires who persevered against tremendous odds.

HONG KONG
Li Ka-shing
NET WORTH: $33.3 Bil
Asia’s wealthiest man quit school at age 12 and took a job at a watch-strap factory to support his family. Li got his start selling plastic toys and other items in Hong Kong in 1950 and later retooled his factory to focus on making plastic flowers. Today his interests expand from retail to property, ports and technology, employing 270,000 people in 52 countries.

ITALY
Leonardo Del Vecchio
NET WORTH: $20.4 Bil
When Del Vecchio was 7 his mother sent him to a Milan orphanage because she couldn't afford to care for him. At 14 he began an apprenticeship in an eyeglass factory. Eleven years later he founded Luxottica. Now the company manufactures glasses for luxury brands around the world, including Burberry, Bulgari, Chanel, Coach, DKNY, Dolce & Gabbana, Armani, Prada, Ralph Lauren, Tiffany and Versace.

U.S.
Jan Koum
NET WORTH: $6.6 bilWhatsApp's cofounder emigrated from Ukraine at 16 with his mother and swept floors in a grocery store to help pay the bills. They lived off her disability when she was diagnosed with cancer. Koum put himself through college and worked at Yahoo as a security and infrastructure engineer. In 2009 he started WhatsApp, the world's biggest mobile messaging service. Facebook bought it for $19 billion in cash and stock in 2014.

RUSSIA
Roman Abramovich
NET WORTH: $9.1 bil
Abramovich was orphaned by age 4 and raised by relatives. After dropping out of college he served with the Soviet army before selling plastic toys from his apartment. Abramovich made a series of oil-export deals in the early 1990s and in 1995 teamed up with Boris Berezovsky to take over oil giant Sibneft at a fraction of its market value.

INDIA
Micky Jagtiani
NET WORTH: $5.2 bil
Jagtiani dropped out of accounting school to clean hotel rooms and drive a taxi in London before moving to Bahrain to help run his family's baby products shop. He was suddenly in charge after his brother, father and mother all died within a year of one another. Today his retail empire Landmark Group generates $5 billion revenues annually from more than 1,900 stores across the Middle East, Africa and India.

U.S.
David Murdock
NET WORTH: $3.1 bil
A dyslexic, Murdock dropped out of high school in the ninth grade to work at a gas station before being drafted into the Army in 1943. When he returned from WWII, he borrowed $1,800 to open a diner. He eventually becoming the chairman of Dole Food, today the world's largest producer of fruits and vegetables.

U.K.
Christos Lazari
NET WORTH: $2.1 bil
The London real estate investor moved to the U.K. from a small village in Cyprus at age 16 with 20 pounds on hand. In London, he washed dishes and waited on restaurant tables, saving enough money to enroll in a London Fashion Design course and to set up the hit Drendie Girl label. In 1978 he began investing in real estate. Today his Lazari Investments owns 2.5 million square feet of London real estate, mostly office rentals.

U.S.
Sheldon Adelson
NET WORTH: $31.4 bil
The son of a cab driver, Adelson grew up sleeping on the floor of a Boston tenement house. He bought his first newspaper corner with a $200 loan from his uncle when he was 12. Over the decades he built a fortune running vending machines, selling newspaper ads, helping small businesses go public, developing condos and hosting trade shows. He now runs the largest casino company in the world, Las Vegas Sands.

U.S.
John Paul DeJoria
NET WORTH: $2.8 bil
DeJoria spent a brief period of the 1980s sleeping in his car in LA's Sunset Strip. The navy vet sold shampoo door-to-door, transforming $700 in savings to hair giant John Paul Mitchell Systems, which he cofounded with Paul Mitchell. Today his empire extends from s and most recently the wireless phone business (ROK mobile).

U.S.
Oprah Winfrey
NET WORTH: $3 bil
The media mogul was born to a teenage mom and raised by her grandmother on a Mississippi farm. She became a TV newscaster in Nashville, Baltimore before joining a Chicago TV station and transforming a third-rated morning show into the nation’s No. 1 talk show. Today Winfrey's entertainment empire spans from broadcast to Hollywood and publishing.

Culled from Forbes in Yahoo Finance

Fake IRS agents target more than 366,000 in huge tax scam-By Stephen Ohlemacher

Investigator says fake IRS agents demand money from more than 366,000 in nationwide tax scam

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- Fake IRS agents have targeted more than 366,000 people with harassing phone calls demanding payments and threatening jail in the largest scam of its kind in the history of the agency, a federal investigator said Thursday.
More than 3,000 people have fallen for the ruse since 2013, said Timothy Camus, a Treasury deputy inspector general for tax administration. They were conned out of a total of $15.5 million.
The scam has claimed victims in almost every state, Camus said. One unidentified victim lost more than $500,000.
"The criminals do not discriminate. They are calling people everywhere, of all income levels and backgrounds," Camus told the Senate Finance Committee at a hearing. "The callers often warned the victims that if they hung up, local police would come to their homes to arrest them."
The scam is so widespread that investigators believe there is more than one group of perpetrators, including some overseas.
Camus said even he received a call from one of the scammers at his home on a Saturday. He said he had a stern message for the caller: "Your day will come."
Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., said he got a similar call, but realized it wasn't a real IRS agent.
"It was a very convincing, convincing phone call," Isakson said.
So far, two people in Florida have been arrested, Camus said. They were accused of being part of a scam that involved people in call centers in India contacting U.S. taxpayers and pretending to be IRS agents.

"These criminal acts are perpetrated by thieves hiding behind telephone lines and computers, preying on honest taxpayers and robbing the Treasury of tens of billions of dollars every year," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. "Taxpayers must be more aware of the risks and better protected from attack and these criminals must be found and brought to justice."

The IRS and the inspector general's office started warning taxpayers about the scam a year ago, and it has since ballooned. This year, it tops the IRS list of "Dirty Dozen" tax scams.

Tax scams often increase during tax filing season, and with millions of Americans preparing their returns ahead of the April 15 deadline, the IRS is seeing many cases of identity theft and refund fraud.

In recent years the IRS has stepped up efforts to detect large numbers of tax refunds going to the same address or bank account. Using computer filters, the agency identified more than 517,000 suspicious returns and blocked $3.1 billion in fraudulent returns, as of October 2014, Camus said in his testimony.

In 2012, the IRS started working more closely with U.S. attorneys' offices around the country to combat tax refund fraud by people using stole identities, said Caroline Ciraolo, acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's tax division. Since then, the tax division has opened nearly 1,000 investigations and brought prosecutions against more than 1,400 people, Ciraolo told the Senate Finance Committee hearing.

"Given the sophistication of this criminal activity and the fact that a lot of it comes from overseas, this looks to me like an emerging type of organized crime," said Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee.

The inspector general's office started receiving complaints about the telephone scam in 2013. Immigrants were the primary target early on, the IG's office said. But the scam has since become more widespread.

As part of the telephone scam, fake IRS agents call taxpayers, claim they owe taxes, and demand payment using a prepaid debit card or a wire transfer. Those who refuse are threatened with arrest, deportation or loss of a business or driver's license, Camus said.

The callers can manipulate caller ID to make it look like they are calling from an IRS phone number. They might even know the last four digits of the taxpayer's Social Security number, Camus said.

They request prepaid debit cards because they are harder to trace than bank cards. Prepaid debit cards are different from bank cards because they are not connected to a bank account. Instead, consumers buy the cards at stores, and use them just like a bank card, until the money runs out or they add more.

Real IRS agents usually contact people first by mail, Camus said. And they never demand payment by debit card, credit card or wire transfer.

"Our message is simple," Camus said. "If someone calls unexpectedly claiming to be from the IRS with aggressive threats if you do not pay immediately, it is a scam artist calling. The IRS does not initiate contact with taxpayers by telephone. If you do owe money to the IRS, chances are you have already received some form of a notice or correspondence from the IRS in your mailbox."

Culled from Associated Press

Managing Customer to have the best -Odunze Reginald C

Image credited to ncsl.com

In 1897, an Italian Economist, Vilfredo Pareto came up with a principle which he called (Principle of Least Effort).  He stated that 80 percent of our success comes from 20 percent of our effort. The rule went on say that 20 percent of our customers give us 80 percent of our business. And 80 percent give us 20 percent of our business. Hence the need to focus more on those that gives us the greatest business.

He called it the 80\20 Rule but his admirer called it “The Pareto Principle” with the advent of the 80\20 Rule came with it other rules, like 90\10 Rule of Money

But according to Robert Kiyosaki (2000) he stated that “The 90\10 rule of money states that 10 percent hold 90 percent of the economy and 90 percent hold 10 percent of the economy”.

From these presentations, it should be noted that the principle of least effort expected us to find ways of satisfying those customers who give us the greatest business, provide us with the necessary incomes to boost our business, is it not wise to device special means of satisfying these customers.

These customers have the enabling economy to provide for us all that we need as an organization to meet our obligations to shareholders, government, to our employees and to the board.

Continuing Kiyosaki “noted that there are two types of money problem, one problem is not enough money and the other is too much money.” He went on to say that it has been said that that there is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come and there is nothing as detrimental than someone who is thinking old ideas,”

Odunze Reginald C is the Lead Consultant, Chareg Consulting.

You can follow our anchor at twitter @regydunze, and our Face book @reginald odunze.com , You can also check us at pensionsbenefit.com

Will your lump sum be enough? - Odunze Reginald

Image credited to Telegraph

There are 3 ways a retiree can access his fund, Lump sum, programmed withdrawal and annuity. Of these three,   a retiree is first and foremost interested in his total money available  to him as lump sum.

Majority of the retirees immediately became disillusioned and sick, once they discovered that they are having only 25 percent of the retirement savings account. This is because they are ignorant of the act and their friends who were opportune to have received 50 percent.

The pension reform act under section 4 subsection c  of the 2004 PRA states that a lump sum to the balance standing to the credit of his retirement savings account: provided that the amount left after that lump sum withdrawal shall be sufficient to procure an annuity or fund programmed withdrawals that will produce an amount not less than 50 per cent of his annual remuneration as at the date of his retirement.

 And in section 7 subsection 1 paragraph a of the PRA 2014 states that withdrawal of a lump sum from the total amount credited to his retirement savings account provided that the amount left after the lump sum withdrawal shall be sufficient to procure a programmed fund withdrawals or annuity for life in accordance with extant guidelines issued by the commission from time to time.

And in arriving at the payment of lump sum to retirees, four factors determine the size of the lump sum, and they are follows: Sex, age, Final salary and RSA balance.

1 Sex

The application that we are using for pension has the principle that women lives more than men , I do not know how they arrived at that but I do know that there are more widows than widowers in my village. In an article by Forbes, titled 15 Richest women in the world, about 13 of them inherited their wealth from their husbands who are now late. And when I did a pilot with National Population Commission, some years ago we also discovered that there are more widows than widowers, it all means that Chile Application which Pencom is using is indirectly right. Because by either the inductive and deductive analysis in statistical research analyst, analyst have come to that conclusion. But events surrounding women living longer than men as a normal application in social statistics indicates that the social mobility of a woman is a straight line and that of a man is an undulating plane. But the hustle of life and the stress of making it in life has come to reduce the life expectancy of a man.

But what this indicates is that generally women with the bio data with a man and retiring at the same time will definitely get a lower lump sum and a lower pension salary than her male colleagues.

2 Age , this plays a prominent role in the calculation of lump sum , the age at which a retiree is very essential in the lump sum calculation, e.g. somebody that retire at the of 50 will not definitely get the same amount with one retiring at the age of 60 or a professor retiring at the age 65 or 70.

It’s just simple mathematics; the retiree at the age of 50 will definitely work for ten years before his normal age retiring at the age of 60.

3 Final salaries

The scheme noted that a retiree is entitled to 50 percent of his last salary, what then happens to a retiree on a meager salary who suddenly finds himself with a huge salary two years to retirement. Obviously that retiree will not have enough in his lump sum calculations. In calculating lump sum, the salaries are needed , when it is consolidated with one variable, two variables , they are all provided for in the computation of final pension benefit and also in the lump sum.

4 The RSA Balance.

RSA balance is also a key factor in determining the size of lump sum, as there a retiree with a closing balance of 3 million Naira and a last salary of 150 thousand Naira will  not be able to get 1.5 Million as a lump sum as his total pension salary of 75 thousand will offset the pension in a period of 20 months.

it should be noted the minimum lump sum is 25 percent and the maximum lump sum is 50 percent, and the values varies within the range. Therefore what you get as your lump sum is a function of these 4 factors highlighted above. It all means you can do more by engaging the services of experts to know what to do to increase your pension pot, and until you that are rest assured that lump sum may or may not be enough for you during retirement.

Odunze Reginald C is the Lead Consultant, Chareg Consulting.

You can follow our anchor at twitter @regydunze, and our Face book @Reginald odunze.com, you can also check us at pensionsbenefit.com

7 financial scams that target seniors-By Ana Gonzalez Ribeiro

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As many senior citizens spend their retirement traveling with family, pursuing second careers or becoming more active in the community, con artists are creating devious schemes to prey on their accumulated wealth.

Most recently, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, 59, said he almost fell for a financial scam. A fraudster posing as an IRS agent called him and left a phone number for him to call back, but after he put the number into Google, he learned it was a well-known scam. He said the IRS has recorded 290,000 scam calls since October 2013.
Michael Raanan, former IRS agent and president of Landmark Tax Group in California, says the IRS telephone scam is one of the most pervasive scams targeting seniors.
He says senior citizens are receiving phone calls from scammers who purport to be IRS agents. They claim to be calling about unpaid back taxes and proceed to threaten the senior citizen with arrest, lawsuits, suspension of their driver's license and more.
"This is the biggest phone scam the IRS has ever seen and has already netted over $5 million after hitting all 50 states and now Canada," Raanan says.
Here we will look at several common scams aimed at seniors.
Health care scam
Senior citizens are most vulnerable to health care scams, according to Tod Burke, associate dean and professor of criminal justice at Radford University in Virginia. Burke says people will call as health care or Medicare representatives to gain access to their personal or contact information.

They will use their contact information to call seniors back at a later date and say they spoke with their daughter, son or other relative and that it's OK to give them Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers or other personal information. Scammers might also offer help getting seniors medical insurance.

In many cases, they use the personal information they provide to bill Medicare and pocket the money, according to the National Council on Aging.

Unscrupulous financial advisers

Gideon Schein, a partner with Eddy and Schein In-Home Administrators for Seniors, says seniors have to be careful, even with trusted professionals. He cites an example of a client who had been paying $40,000 extra per month to a financial adviser who had known the client's father.

"My clients -- George, a retired math professor, and Elaine, a homemaker -- had their money with an institution for almost 20 years. I had been working for them for two years when their daughter called to ask me why her parents had spent so much money last year. I informed her that they did not. She then asked, 'What have I been doing with $40,000 per month?'" Schein says. "I told her that I only got $20,000. Since the distributions were regular and sufficient, I had never asked to see a statement."
It turns out that their financial adviser had been taking $20,000 out of the distribution for himself. This had been going on for years. Their adviser was convicted of fraud and embezzlement, but Schein's company was able to recover 70 percent of the money taken.
Financial advisers with excellent credentials, experience and ethnics abound, but it's always important to pay close attention to the money coming in and going out of your investment accounts.
Great grandchild scam
Scammers will call pretending to be a grandchild or great grandchild and try to get money from the senior, Burke says. Before paying them, make sure the person is an actual relative.
A scammer will place a call to a senior citizen and when the mark picks up, the fraudster will say something like: "Hi, Grandma. Do you know who this is?" When the unsuspecting grandparent guesses the name of a grandchild the scammer most sounds like, the scammer has established a fake identity. Once they establish a relationship, they ask for money.
"They'll know just enough information that they get from Facebook and other social media websites, such as where the grandkids live, where they are vacationing or other personal details, and use this information to get (the senior) to open up," Burke says. "If the scammer is calling from a cellphone with bad reception or a Bluetooth, it's not always easy to decipher and know it's not the relative."
Prescription and anti-aging drug scams
Because of the rising costs of some prescription drugs, senior citizens are going online to look for cheaper drugs. But these drugs can be counterfeit, making this scam extremely dangerous.
Or, in another iteration of the prescription drug scam, the fraudsters just take the money without delivering the drugs. These are referred to by Bonnie Russell, founder of the Stop Elder Financial Abuse website, as faceless online pharmacies

This scam is growing in popularity. Since 2000, the Food and Drug Administration has investigated an average of 20 such cases per year, up from five per year in the 1990s, according to the National Council on Aging.

"The same goes with some anti-aging products," Burke adds.

Whether it's fake Botox, like the scam in Arizona that made its distributors $1.5 million in about a year, or bogus homeopathic remedies, seniors are being targeted by fraudsters offering anti-aging products.

If it's too good to be true, it is," Burke says.

Burke advises seniors who are faced with dubious transactions or products to contact their local police department. Many police departments have a fraud unit. If not, they likely will refer them to the state police or FBI.

The obituary scam

In the obituary scam, con artists read obituaries from the local paper and call the deceased relative's family and demand money for a supposed outstanding debt that the deceased left behind.

Another version of this scam is when fraudsters read the obituaries to pinpoint recent widows as targets. After identifying their next victim, a messenger arrives at the home of the recent widow with a cash-on-delivery package, claiming the recently deceased spouse ordered something and then demands immediate payment. After taking the money, the messengers are long gone before the victim realizes the box contains old magazines or newspapers that are worthless.

"As if it's not bad enough to scam seniors, this one really pulls at the heartstrings," says Sandra Crasko, vice president of community services at Chicagoland Methodist Senior Services.

She says that by reading obituaries, scammers are identifying their targets and appealing to them at their worst moment.

"Anyone who is legitimate will come back or give you their contact information, an order number, a tracking number or even identify who was the originator of the package," Crasko says.

"If there truly is a package that needs to be delivered, you can say, 'I don't have the money right now,' or 'I need to verify this and get back to you.' If someone doesn't feel right for whatever reason, take time to research it and that's OK," Crasko says.

Funeral and cemetery plot scams

Even some shady funeral homes have been caught doing dishonest business. They will have seniors buy the most expensive casket, even if they are performing a cremation, Burke says.

They will say things like, "You need this casket because you want to be able to remember them this way," Burke says.

When going to a funeral home, it's best to have all the questions you want answered written down ahead of time, he says. Seniors should give themselves time to do their research. Go with a family member or a close friend.

Another tactic of disreputable funeral homes is to capitalize on family members' unfamiliarity with the considerable cost of funeral services to add unnecessary charges to the bill.

These scams can affect anyone, but seniors tend to be targeted more often, Burke says.

Culled from Bankrate.com

The 4 NO’S of Selling and its impact on Pension-Odunze Reginald C

Image credited to Forbes

As the Pension Reform Act 2014 came into play following the amendment of the pension Reform Act 2004.  Before the enactment of the law, the pension environment has been a subject of issues

 And challenges occasioned with misappropriation of fund, failure of the retiree to access his retirement benefit, resulting in death, lack of interest in adhering to the scheme and above all government nonchalant attitude in ensuring that those who perpetrate such vices are brought to book.

The failure of the National Provident Act of 1973 came with different pension acts, which included the pension act of 1990, NSITF Act of 1993, Police and other Agencies Pension Office Establishment Act of 1993, Police Pension Rights or The Inspector General of Police Act 1993.

All these Acts have come to impact negatively, and affect the psyche of the people resulting in the 4NO’S of Selling on pension. The 4NO’S of selling are as follows:

1 No Trust

Of all the 4NO’S of selling, trust is the key thing, pension is a function of trust, and once there is no trust , definitely there will be no pension. Everything dies if there is no trust.

2 No Need

Ignorance of the scheme has made employers and employees to fell and say that they do not need pension, for the employer they feel that they are saving money, for the employee they want to eat their tomorrow today. The employer feels that they are spending a lot, no good roads, no electricity, no good water, and government want to lord pension on them

3 No Help

The worst obstacle to buying pension is that the customer is already using a pension fund administrator, in which case, you cannot have another one, until the National Pension Commission lifts the window of transfer. The lifting of transfer window will remedy this and make the scheme more competitive.

4 No Hurry

Both the employees and the employer do that a lot, they will say that management is yet to decide, or the employee will say he is trying to be cautious.

Odunze Reginald C is the Lead Consultant, Chareg Consulting.

You can follow our anchor at twitter @regydunze, and our Face book @Reginald odunze.com, You can also check us at pensionsbenefit.com

Managing Pension in a distressed Economy-Odunze Reginald

Image credited to nordsoc.org

And as Rich day will say “an individual’s reality is the boundary between faith and self confidence, and a person’s financial reality will not clear until he or she go beyond the fears and doubts of his or her own self imposed limits.

In article captioned  “4 dangerous assumptions that could hurt retirement plan” ,which appeared in Morning star,  Christine Benz noted that  ”Continued portfolio contributions, delayed withdrawals, and delayed Social Security filing can all greatly enhance a retirement portfolio's sustainability. Given those considerations, as well as the ebbing away of pensions, increasing longevity, and the fact that the financial crisis did a number on many pre-retirees' portfolios, it should come as no surprise that older adults are pushing back their planned retirement dates. Whereas just 11% of individuals surveyed in the 1991 Employee Benefit Research Institute's Retirement Confidence Survey said they planned to retire after age 65, that percentage had tripled--to 33%--in the 2014. In 1999, just 5% of EBRI's survey respondents said they planned to never retire, whereas 10% of the 2014 respondents said that.

Continuing Benz noted that “With that in mind, there appears to be a disconnect between pre-retirees' plans to delay retirement and whether they actually do. While a third of the workers in the 2014 survey said they planned to work past age 65, just 16% of retirees said they had retired post-age 65. And a much larger contingent of retirees--32%--retired between the ages of 60 and 64, even though just 18% of workers said they plan to retire that early.  The variance owes to health considerations (the worker's, his or her spouse's, or parents'), unemployment, or untenable physical demands of the job, among other factors.”

Therefore managing pension in a distressed economy has its challenges, issues and prospects, this is because in a depressed economy , all has been stretched to a point of utter helplessness, and there is that urge and genuine desire to make out the best out of that situation, to save for a rainy day.

Odunze noted in article titled Major key to successful retirement noted that “ On how many people fail during retirement, is a function of their ability to kick starting whatever they are used to even on a smaller scale during old age. Old age comes with it issues, problems, non  acceptance , health issues and  a disconnect with current happenings in life, there is also the generation gap, and so doing what you love most or whatever you have been doing most is the key to survival. So a retired policeman, or army officer can comfortable operate a security outfit and consultancy”

 

Odunze Reginald C is the Lead Consultant, Chareg Consulting.

You can follow our anchor at twitter @regydunze, and our Face book @reginald odunze.com , You can also check us at pensionsbenefit.com