Shirley Bertholf

By Wednesday evening at this time, I will have arrived in Orlando, Florida and will be making myself at home in a room at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort for the next three days.  What is the occasion?  United First Financial® is hosting their 3rd International Convention which they’ve entitled, “Come, See What We’re Working On!”

I don’t know how many of you are aware of  United First Financial, but if you aren’t, you should be!  This is a fairly new company, whose first product, the Money Merge Account® program, has been offered to the public now for three years after passing a 2-year test market exposure with flying colors.

What do the folks at United First Financial and their Money Merge Account program do?  They offer a program that will enable their clients to eliminate all mortgage and consumer debt in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take them, while potentially saving themselves thousands of dollars in interest they are currently scheduled to pay.  In their first 2 1/2 years, the Money Merge Account program has enabled UFirst™’s clients to pay down over $355,000,000 in mortgage principle and that number is rising every single day.

This amazing program has earned its founders the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® Award for Financial Services in the Utah Region for 2008.  It has also attracted the attention of major publications such as Mortgage Planner Magazine, Success From Home, and Personal Real Estate Investor, among others.  Personal Real Estate Investor Magazine awarded United First Financial and the Money Merge Account program with their Editor’s Choice Award for 2008, and has just featured UFirst again in the September/October issue currently on the newsstands.

But UFirst is not finished yet!  They have now gone full circle with their dream of not only enabling their clients to eliminate debt, but making it possible to build wealth, create a secure, tax-protected retirement, and leave behind a lasting financial legacy for those they love.

Through a unique, patent-pending  system called B.O.S.S. (Banker’s Optimal System of Security), United First Financial enables folks to actually create their own banking system, in which money they spend for home furnishings, business equipment, automobiles, college education, etc. begins flowing back toward them rather than away from them.  This system also creates an instant estate,  is not at the mercy of the markets, offers liquidity and access to your funds,  and provides predictable, tax protected retirement income.  That’s huge in light of the current condition of most people’s retirement plans!  And besides all that, there is a death benefit to pass on to your survivors.

I feel like I’m on a crusade these days — buying America back, one family at a time!  And if we can get the word out to enough people, perhaps we can hand our children a better, brighter future than the one that’s looming currently on the horizon.

The last time we went camping, we stopped for gas at a local filling station and the attendant asked if we were moving!  That’s because, even though we love to go tent camping, we take as many conveniences with us as we can.

We load a trailer with lots of wood, several tables, a porta potty, a three burner propane stove, a gearbox turned into camp kitchen cabinet, our sleeping tent, a canopy tent for over the table and cooking area, and an Aero bed.

Yes, an Aero bed.  We like to be comfortable.  We don’t usually have electricity, so we bought a converter and always take along a lengthy extension cord so we can connect to our car battery.  That has extra benefits as well, since, as a self-employed business person with United First Financial,I can work from anywhere.   If I can power my laptop computer, we are then free to stay an extra day or two if the fancy strikes.

Well, last tent camping trip, my husband blew up our air mattress, but a few minutes later when he went to spread our Coleman sleeping bags over the top of it, it was totally flat!  Okay…try again, he thought.  Perhaps he didn’t quite get the cap closed properly.

Alas!  This time he heard the hissing sound…not a hole, mind you, but apparently one of the baffles had separated from the rest and couldn’t hold up its end of the bargain.  What to do?  We had paid for three nights at this camp site but, at our age, the hard ground was just not an option!

Well, we thought, let’s try duct tape!  It works for everything else.  We began applying pieces of duct tape over the offending baffle.  For a moment there, it looked like it might work.

Then we noticed an air bubble under the duct tape, growing larger and snaking toward the tape’s edge.  Okay then…let’s add another piece of duct tape to better seal the edge.  The bubble kept moving outward in its desperate attempt to escape.  No matter how many pieces of duct tape we used, the bubble managed to find its way to freedom.

It was obvious that our fancy-dancy bed was done for.  There was no hole to patch.  The entire infrastructure of the bed had given way.  Thankfully, some family members hauled cushions out of their camper, and we managed to finish the camping trip without too many aches and pains.  But we knew that before we could go tent camping again, another air mattress would be required.

After hours talking with friends, searching online, and reading reviews, we decided on a raised air mattress with a bit of memory foam on top and its own built-in pump.

It was delivered last weekend, and we have slept on it a couple of times to try it out.  We’ve added an old egg-crate foam topper we had in the attic and a mattress pad.  It’s not bad!

And now, we are very anxious to go camping again!  So, Sunday afternoon, we will be heading out to our favorite campsite upriver about twenty miles.  You just can’t keep a good tent camper down for long!

By the way, the reason we can go camping on Sunday afternoons when everyone else is returning home,  can have our pick of camp sites, and miss all the traffic and noise of the weekend is because I am my own boss!  With my United First Financial business, I can set my own schedule.   And that’s nice!

Kirby and I just spent a great weekend in Vancouver, B.C. on the 19th floor of the World Mark II Hotel.  It rained most of the weekend, but we mostly just needed a place to get away and relax anyway.

We went for walks each day in Stanley Park.  What a beautiful park with wonderful trails and sidewalks for what seems like miles.  The sidewalk hugs the water and marina with a spectacular view of the Vancouver skyline.  Today I had my camera with me and was getting ready to take a picture of Kirby up in the limbs of a fallen tree stripped of all but its main branches.  A local woman stopped and offered to take both our pictures and we ended up in a pleasant conversation with a very interesting person.  It’s amazing how many beautiful people there are in God’s world and most of them we will never meet.  Once in awhile, when we happen upon a serendipitous moment with one of them, we walk away feeling rich and part of something much bigger than we had originally thought.

It took us about an hour to get across the border, not us, personally, but the wait in the car line.  Not sure what made the delay, but when we got to the booth, the agent was friendly and waved us on after a couple of questions and a little bantering.

We saw a rainbow on the way home as the rain came while there was still sun shining through the clouds in places.  We could actually see its end, or so it seemed.  But as we drove, the end seemed to glide along with us.  Our God made such lovely things.  Thank you, Lord, for the beauty around us!