Whenever I envision the home of a billionaire, no matter what style of architecture their home features, there is always a beautiful garden. In this garden there are often many beautiful and colorful flowers, shrubs, trees and the obligatory fountain or statue. Depending on the taste of the home owner, there will be climbing vines, row after row of roses, tall flowering trees and fresh vegetables growing under the sun. After all, if you are a billionaire you can afford to hire the help you need to keep your garden flourishing. It can be time consuming to weed out and prune your plants and trees. But every billionaire knows that the time and money spent on the garden is repaid to them tenfold. Keep reading to find out if you should consider planting a garden in order to add some that billionaire magic into your life.

Photo by David Claval

Picture this: you are a billionaire woman, waking up early in the morning. You get up feeling refreshed, ready to face the day and grateful for all of the amazing things in your life and your strong connection to your divine power. You walk over to the huge window in your bedroom and push the lush curtains aside. The sun peeks through the window and you peer out at the vastness of the abundant land that you inhabit. Your eyes rest on the beautiful plants, flowers, shrubs and trees that are growing more beautiful and fruitful every day. Don’t you feel a sense of inner peace knowing that no matter what, you will always have your garden and you can enjoy the most beautiful flower bouquets and the freshest salads?

Gardening For the Environment

That is the power of having your own garden. Starting a vegetable and fruit garden is good for the soul, the body and the mind. When you are gardening, you are focused on the outer world and you forget your worries. You also develop a bond with the small seeds and as they grow and mature, reaching ever further toward the sky, you can’t help but feel attached to them. You notice that you are always growing, just like them, and that the more you notice their growth and beauty, the more you notice your own. Taking care of your garden when it is warm allows you to get a healthy dose of sunshine induced vitamin D. If it gets cold at night and you need to cover up your garden you feel at one with the changing seasons and the variations in weather. Following the cycles of the season is another great way to feel at one with the amazing planet that we live with.

Growing your own vegetables and fruits is great for the environment, it is one of the greenest things you could consider doing. Some people are trying to follow the 100 mile diet, which consists entirely of produce grown within 100 miles of the person’s residence. These days others are considering living the 100 foot diet and eating mostly from the food that they can grow on their property. Billionaires understand the importance of thinking globally and acting locally and they often grow their own food because they want to experience the freshness of hand picking their own food.

Photo by Georgie Sharp

Gardening and Wealth

So how can you take a stand for the environment, improve your health by eating the most nutritious foods and create a relaxing time and space for yourself? Growing your own garden of course. If you think that you don’t have time for a full blown garden you can start with smaller potted seeds such as herb or tomato plants. You will be amazed at how quickly these little green organisms become an integral part of your life. More importantly, you might want to consider the associations between a garden and your income. When you plant a garden you create the perfect conditions for growth, such as a rich soil, plenty of sunshine, water and love. You place the seed in the soil and every day you look at the earth until one day soon you see the beginnings of your seed peeking through. Day by day the plant begins to grow and you continue to take care of it consistently, looking forward to the day that it will bear fruits or edible vegetables.

The same happens when you want to create income and wealth. You decide how you want to create this wealth and set up the perfect conditions for this creation. You decide which ventures will work for you, you talk to people and find out how to go about it. You set your intentions and the seed is sown and once you notice that there is some money coming in you know that your seed is sprouting. You know that the income is on its way, as surely as the fact that any seed planted in the right conditions will grow. By continuing to apply yourself consistently you begin to see the snowballing effects of your increasing income until one day you get the fruits of your labor directly. Now just like you need to take the seeds out of the fruits from your last harvest for the new year’s crops you create more opportunities for yourself from the ones that have presented themselves and flowered in the past.

I hope that thinking of what life is like as a billionaire woman with a vibrant and fragrant garden you might consider planting your own garden. I have seen first hand the transformative benefits of starting your own garden and I cannot recommend it enough. Especially now that the price of food is increasing, I believe that everyone can benefit from eating off of their land or from potted plants by the windowsill. So join me on the path to freedom and start yourself a compost bin. We are in this together, creating a beautiful planet to live on where everyone can grow and become better individuals and cultivate the wealth that they want.

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Looking back on my life I realize that I have had many great mentors and idols. They have all helped me to grow as a person and to become the woman that I am today. I wanted to share some of my experiences with mentors and to encourage you to make a similar list and look for the current day mentors that inspire you today. I am still finding new mentors every day and I look forward to each new encounter knowing that I might meet a mentor within them. I remember how much I looked up to the women in my life and how much I tried to be like them. I would preen like Marilyn Monroe, kick like my Tae Kwon Do instructor, program my computer like Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I looked up to my babysitters and would often ask them to tell me stories about their lives, how many friends they had or what having a boyfriend was like and what made them tick.

Today I realized that I am now in the mentoring role. I have been an inspiration to young girls who practiced Tae Kwon Do after me and saw that attaining a black belt at such a young age is possible. I have blazed a trail for other girls from my high school to attend University classes in an Engineering or Mathematics related field. Recently I also realized that I am a role model for one our family friends’ daughter who is growing up and going through high school. It feels strange to be the one to impart my knowledge and experience, but at the same time it feels rewarding knowing that I can help others just by being myself and aspiring to grow as an individual and set new standards of excellence for myself.

The reason I started Billionaire Woman was so that we could each have powerful and successful women to look up to. Although I am still working on the Billionaire Case studies, I have found that in order for us to learn from someone, the person does not need to have amassed a large fortune. In fact it is often by looking at those less fortunate than us that we can truly see what is worth living for and how to keep a positive outlook on life.

I hope this list will inspire you to look back on all of the great mentors you have had and see if you could spread your wisdom or experiences to others who might need it.

My Mother
I think every young girl looks up to her mother and learns from her in one way or another. It is probably because of my constant imitation of my mother that today many of my reactions in life are similar to those of my mother. She taught me to be responsible, to be caring of others and to follow my heart. She always wanted me to experience things that she was unable to experience when she was a young girl. Because of her upbringing, I am now a flourishing successful woman. I also hold very different viewpoints about life and sometimes this causes some friction between us. However we are still close and every day we share in our common goals and wishes for the earth.

My best friends
The first few friends you make tend to influence you a lot. I discovered that I was easily swayed by their opinions and ideas. I even plastered my walls with Jonathan Taylor Thomas pictures because my best friend introduced me to the teen boy thing. I also enjoyed similar music to my friends and I cared deeply about their opinions. Today some of these things have changed as I’ve matured and evolved, but some of the important factors remain: when the going gets tough, my friends and I are there for each other.

My Tae Kwon Do Instructor
My Tae Kwon Do instructor reminded me of myself so much that I emulated her every move and it showed. Some of our Tae Kwon Do friends watched a video tape of my performance during a Tae Kwon Do national competition and it took them half of the performance to realize that it was me and not my instructor. Today my instructor and I are still in contact and although the nature of our relationship has changed, we still exchange ideas and she still inspires me to be the best that I can be, no matter what.

Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Who said I couldn’t have idols who were fictional? Buffy the Vampire Slayer along with the character Willow both really inspired me. I was doing Tae Kwon Do and I was pursuing computer programming and web site design in my spare time. These girls helped me to realize that it was normal for women to take on a male-dominated field and excel. I watched these shows over and over for many years. I still watch them from time to time, but now their memory is all that I need to remind myself that anything is possible.

Acid Burn from the movie Hackers
The movie Hackers was the first to romanticize the computer programming field for me. I had always had a passion for computers and writing, but before this movie I would never really have considered to pursue it with such fervor. The fact that the male character and the female character are in a constant battle of the minds and sexes also fueled my desire to find more women like me. I think that the stubbornness of the Acid Burn character taught me that sometimes it takes a bit of hard hardheadedness to get what you want. I am still interested in the gender issue to this day.
Angelina Jolie
As you can tell from my previous choice of idols, I always had a sweet spot for Angelina Jolie. When she came to film a movie in my home town in Quebec, Canada I was blessed to get a chance to meet her. I really admire her tenacity, her edge, her compassion and her devotion to other human beings. She has proven herself to be a great stewardess of the planet and I really think she cares for children everywhere and the people of this earth.

More recently…

Sarma MeIngailis
When living in New York City I visited Sarma’s Pure Food and Wine restaurant as often as I could. Although I never formally met Sarma I saw her every now and then at the cafe. I was awed by her beauty and inspired by the message she passed along in her book. I keep in touch with her happenings by reading her weblog and I am proud to have her as an role model.

Tina Su
Recently I discovered the weblog of Tina Su. After realizing that she graduated from the same University as I, I contacted her and found out we had a lot more in common than I first imaged. I really look up to Tina because she has taken charge of her life and she is a great example of being present. I enjoy learning from her experiences over at her site Think Simple Now, and I look forward to possibly meeting her one day.

One word of caution that I want to impart on you is to remember that our mentors, idols and guides are just as human as we are. As one wise master cautioned her disciples to impose their needs for perfection on her: “You harm yourself when giving me all your power.” [Paraphrased from One Minute Wisdom, Anthony deMello in The Mentor’s Spirit, Marsha Sinetar] I want to remind you that mentors, teachers and those who inspire us might be gurus in our eyes, but they are still human with warts and all. They have had their own trying experiences and they have come out the other end, one way or another. They make choices every day in their lives and there might be aspects of their personalities that we do not like or understand. But that does not mean they cannot teach us to grow and flourish. In fact it is often by seeing how people we admire act under tough conditions that we can see how we would ourselves solve problems in our lives.

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If you are an ambitious high achiever type of woman, then you have probably experienced first hand how hard it can be to try balancing out your personal relationships with your work. As billionaire women enthusiasts, we can learn a lot by taking a few steps back and noticing what other women and men have learned about the fragile balance of work and life. After all, we don’t need to balance our work and personal lives all by our lonesome, there are others out there to help us do this the right way.

Photo and caption by Ron Marshall

As Dave Navarro highlighted in his post about making the time for your family and your life, time is always ticking and there are moments that we can never truly recapture. Moments like your child’s first day at school, their theater performances, sports games and competitions, your spouse’s anniversary, your parents’ wedding anniversary and so on. From my observations, men tend to be more involved in their work and not have time to focus on some of these types of activities as much as women. However there are definitely times when a woman might decide that getting some work done and calling the babysitter to watch over her kids for the evening is a good choice. Indeed these situations are hard to judge on the spot, but if you come up with a plan for yourself with guidelines ahead of time, you won’t feel so guilty about your decisions.

Work Life Balance Exercise

Here is a quick activity that you can do that will relieve all of your work/life balance stress, if you put it in practice.

1. Write down what activities and events take precedence over your daily home life routine. For example if there is a business meeting with clients that comes up and you are asked to be present, decide whether or not this is more important than going home and spending time with your family. You might decide that these meetings are only important if you are going after a promotion more aggressively, or if you feel that the clients need more attention to make a deal. On the other hand you might decide that company events such as dinners and galas take precedence only if you do not have any engagements with your children or spouse. For example you would choose to go to a school play over a company dinner, or vise versa. There are no wrong choices here, as long as you make them ahead of time and stick to them. Of course after working with these decisions for awhile, you should review your decisions and see if you need to make any adjustments based on your new experiences.
2. Write down what home life activities and events take precedence over work. These might be things like taking your children to the dentist, doctor, or hospital. Or things like your children’s school activities, parent-teacher night, your spouse’s night to make dinner, etc. These will vary wildly based on who you are, what type of a family you have and what your priorities are.
3. If you choose to do so, you can let you boss know about this new framework that you have put in place for yourself. It will help you stick to your commitments and if you feel guilty about skipping out on a business breakfast to bring your kids to school, your boss and coworkers will understand and even encourage you to stick to your commitment.
4. Every few months, take the time to review the priorities that you’ve set in place and see how they are working for you. If they aren’t, then make the adjustments necessary. I recommend that you write everything down on paper or in a document on your computer. It is much easier to refer to something that is written down than to try to remember why you decided to place priority on working overtime instead of on cleaning the house, a few months down the line.

I am personally putting this system into practice in my daily life and already I am seeing some good results. I do not yet have any children of my own, but I am prioritizing time spent with my parents, my grandparents and my partner in order to feel good about both my work and my life. I really think that once you are clear about your expectations for yourself, you will feel great making those quick work/life balance decisions and sticking to them. Not to mention being able to relax knowing that you are not missing any of the important moments in your family member’s lives, because we all know that time flies and if you don’t make an effort to be there for your family, you might regret it when they are all grown up.

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There are plenty of rich men and women out there. Yet most of us tend to respect those rich people more if they managed to get to where they are on their own, say without inheritance money. In fact, I personally love rags to riches stories and reading about how people made it big through sheer will and determination. Most people might label people as “self-made” when either a man or a woman goes from a regular life to that of a millionaire or billionaire. My question recently has been about where the law of attraction and the idea of deliberately creating things comes in. For instance, how does the lottery fit in to the self made millionaire definition? Would you consider it to be a fluke or a luck of the draw event? So would lottery winners automatically fall into the category of rich women and men who are not self made and who got it easy? I would like to explore this question, and if you disagree with me I would love to read what you think in the comments section.

After doing some extensive research in the area of the wealthiest women in the world, I discovered that most of the top women actually inherited their wealth. Personally, I don’t think there is anything wrong with gaining tremendous wealth through such means. However, I want this weblog to act as inspiration for the rest of us regular women out there, who want to be able to take charge of our finances and increase our incomes. So I started researching more into the self-made millionaire women out there.

Photo by Jeremy Brooks

Traditional Self Made Millionaires and Billionaires

Most of the time when we think of self made millionaires and billionaires we think of women who have made a great impact on this world. Indeed women like Oprah Winfrey and J. K. Rowling have captured the hearts of many people. It is probably because of their tremendous passions that they have amassed such large amounts of personal wealth. They are definitely examples of rags to riches, although they both came from different backgrounds. Oprah Winfrey grew up in an impoverished neighborhood and fed her imagination and her mind by reading many books. She states that she learned about all of the possibilities of the world through her readings and this helped her to expand her horizons. She made it big and landed her own talk show after working as a news anchor first. J.K. Rowling is the author of the hugely successful Harry Potter books. She was down and out on her luck when she first started writing the books. She was a single mother trying to make ends meet. After receiving a slew of rejections from publishers she broke through and got the first Harry Potter book published. Now she is one of the richest authors in the world.

Millionaires and Billionaires Through the Law of Attraction

I am a strong advocate of the law of attraction and the power of our intentions, when performed properly. I do believe that we possess tremendous personal power and that we can achieve anything that we put our heart and minds to. I have tried to incorporate this belief when writing for this weblog, since I think that everyone can benefit from the tools that the law of attraction can give us. For example simply being grateful taking the time to make goals for ourselves and following through with our intentions can make huge impacts and changes in our lives. I am a living example of these techniques. In addition there are several people who have been influenced by the law of attraction. Jack Canfield is the co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books and he often explains how he managed to create his current reality. He was flat broke and making less than $8,000 per year when he started to focus on increasing his wealth using the law of attraction. In the movie “The Secret” he describes how he would look at a pretend $100,000 dollar bill every day. After he started doing this consistently, things started to shift for him and he got lucrative ideas, events unfolded and he managed to amass a large fortune. Today Jack Canfield teaches some of the techniques he used to increase his wealth through positive thinking and other tools that increase the efficiency of the human attraction mechanisms.

Jack Canfield is definitely a self made millionaire. Although he used the law of attraction to set the wheels into motion, most people would agree that he created his wealth “by himself” and not through inheritance. However, I believe that we never do anything completely by ourself in this world. We are not in a vacuum and we are constantly supported by the good of the Universe, whatever name you choose for it.

Lottery Winners Via Law of Attraction

The final group of wealthy people I wanted to discuss were those who get rich through the lottery. Like most people, I used to think that the lottery was a hoax and that no one I knew would ever win. Until my childhood friend’s family won $12 million dollars. I will call my friend Sarah to maintain anonymity. After watching the movie “The Secret” my friend and her family decided to set the intention of winning the lottery. Her father wrote himself a cheque for $10 million dollars and her mother wrote herself a cheque for $500,000. The whole family was having fun with this new way of thinking and they enjoyed going through the exercise of planning what they would do with the money. They had organized how they would split the money, who would get what percentage and so on. My friend Sarah even started telling people that her family was going to win the lottery. Most people huffed, thinking it was just a bunch of mumbo jumbo. But then in July 2007, her father went to check his lottery ticket, like he does every week. When he put his ticket into the machine, a song started playing and the numbers 12,000,000 started flashing on the screen. He remained calm, because he already knew he had won. He had set the intention and he knew that he was a winner. When he called his wife to let her know, she didn’t believe him because everyone had already been talking about winning the lottery so much. But it was true.

Personally I am a lot less skeptical when it comes to putting out intentions into the Universe. I don’t recommend that everyone should immediately rush off to buy lottery tickets. But I would like to change your perceptions about what a self made millionaire or billionaire really is. If someone were to set the intention of becoming a billionaire or millionaire, and they focused on their current joy and fulfillment I believe that they would achieve their goal eventually. I consider this to be the definition of a self made millionaire. In reality, I think that traditional self made millionaires and billionaires must have used the law of attraction along the way as well. Oprah Winfrey herself states that she did not know of the existence of “The Secret” but that she used some of its techniques in her youth to advance in her life.

I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on the idea that we are all self made millionaires and billionaires. Does your definition include lottery winners and deliberate creators?

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Name: Liliane Bettencourt

Age: 86, born October 21, 1922

Citizen of: France, living in Paris, France

Marital Status: Widowed, with 1 child

Source of Wealth: Inherited from her father Eugene Schueller, the founder of L’Oreal cosmetics company.

What makes her special: She is the richest woman in France, and one of the richest people in the world. In 2007, Forbes estimated her net wealth to be $20.7 billion.

Rank on BillionaireWoman.com: #1st of many billionaire women to be studied.

Liliane Bettencourt’s Past
Liliane Bettencourt’s past was kept quite private, but I was able to uncover some interesting articles about her husband, Andre Bettencourt who passed away in 2007. According to the Telegraph, Andre Bettencourt’s past associations with anti-semitic groups have been resurfacing since his death. He seems to have been intertwined with the L’Oreal fortune since his youth, where he was part of the group La Cagoule, which was bankrolled by Eugene Schueller, Liliane’s father. He then went on to marry Liliane in 1950, making him one of the richest men in France. He and Liliane had a daughter together, who is now a member of the board of directors for the L’Oreal company. Liliane inherited her father’s wealth after his death in 1957. She is the principal shareholder of the L’Oreal company, with 27.5% of shares. Although her husband and father seem to have had checkered pasts, no such thing can be said of Liliane. In fact, to the contrary, Liliane created the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation, which awards a prize to European researchers under the age of forty-five - the “Liliane Bettencourt Prize for Life Sciences.” This is another great example of how women can turn wealth into positive outcomes for others in their community.

What the future holds

Liliane Bettencourt’s life has always been kept under wraps. But what seems interesting to me is the fact that L’Oreal is now a global company, that still trades out of Paris only. In fact Liliane has been resisting any changes to the way that the company is being managed. However some spokespeople close to the company are saying that changes are inevitable. Personally, I am quite interested in knowing what Liliane’s daughter would think about a change to the company’s holding structure, since that would impact her inheritance as well. Only time will tell.

What we can learn from her

Liliane Bettencourt inherited a large sum of money, and learned to harness it and make it work for her and her fellow Europeans. An article in The Guardian describes her as one of the great stereotypical female leaders of the matriarch type. The article goes on to describe how Liliane may have inherited her wealth, but so have countless women throughout the ages, and this fact has generally created strong and decisive women leaders. Therefore I think it is important to remember that even though women like Liliane were not “self made billionaires” overnight, they did need to cultivate their own financial prowess to survive in a tough high stakes world. So just as women who were born into royal families had to learn the skills of negotiation, political savvy, and street smarts, so do women who inherit large sums of money. I think that as women who have not inherited billions, we can learn to be more like Liliane by honing our matriarchal skills and helping others around us. We can teach those of us who are younger and encourage others to reach for their full potentials, while still keeping control of our own power and respectability. I do believe that this is something every woman needs to work on, since it is obviously not an easy task.

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In my search to find out more about billionaires and to help inspire women to become billionaires, I have come across many interesting trends. Recently there have been some downturns in the value of some already established billionaires and millionaires, due to the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States. However, the downturn in the US economy has not been a bad thing for some, since the number of Billionaires in the United Kingdom rose from 33 to 42 by the end of 2007. Similarly two new Canadians became billionaires this past year.

However the number of American Billionaire Women is still extremely high, with 36 female billionaires from the United States. Looking at the percentage, out of 62 billionaire women in 2007, 58% of female billionaires reside in the United States. If you want to see who these billionaire women are, stay tuned because I will be focusing in on each one in the coming weeks and months as new billionaires are made.

What does this mean for the number of billionaire women? Let me quote Forbes Senior Editor Pete Newcomb about the increasing number of women billionaires:

Interviewer: Does the increase in self-made women billionaires reflect business being more open to women or the economy changing to favor industries traditionally more open to women?

Pete Newcomb: I think it just shows the growing number of women entrepreneurs. 40 years ago that wasn’t a viable option. For the most part, women didn’t leave college planning to pursue a career in business.

I could not agree more. There is obviously a difference between self made billionaires or millionaires and those that have inherited their wealth. However, these days with the internet and the changing of traditional family roles, women are allowed to take a stand and earn their share of the family’s income. It is only by changing our thinking about the possibilities of creating income that we will see an increase in female billionaires. After all, if women can be successful at running a household, why wouldn’t they be successful at running a small company, and from there upward to a large company and then even larger roles.

So if you are a woman looking to increase your net worth, why not subscribe to this site and stay informed about the different changes you can implement in your life to help you skyrocket to billionaire status.

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This web site was set up with the intention of pushing more women over the one billion dollar threshold. However, after much internal discussion with myself, I discovered that really the amount of money one amasses in their lifetime is not nearly as important as the joy they experienced. Nonetheless, I really like the idea of everyone becoming a billionaire, so I am sticking to the name.

However, the mission of this web site is to help everyone, man or woman, young or old, rich or poor, to feel the amazing life force that we each have within us. I want everyone to experience the inner joy of the billionaire. That is why this weblog will often have posts detailing case studies of billionaires, how they made their billions, how they act, feel and smile. I strongly believe that by emulating those people who we deem to be successful, we can learn from their failures and overcome our own fears.

So join me as I explore my own feelings toward becoming a billionaire woman. I must mention that at the time of this writing I am not a billionaire, nor am I experiencing all of the inner fuzziness that most successful people seem to exude. But this weblog is here to help me express my findings on the topic of inner joy and living the billionaire’s lifestyle.

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