Money is perhaps the greatest source of conflict in marriage, but it doesn’t have to be that way. As I love to share in my workshops, creating a shared vision can be one of the most profound intimacies a couple ever experiences. And creating and executing a plan to manifest that vision is an extraordinary partnership-building process.
Wherever you are on the income/asset scale, for the next 24 hours, think like a prosperous person.
If you have a moment of anxiety about financial issues, tell yourself that “All my needs will be met abundantly and with ease.” Each time you feel a jolt of anxiety, say it again. Say it until the jolt of anxiety goes away for good, or at least for today.
Figure out roughly how much you earned today, after deductions, and go online and open two new accounts within your primary bank account, one for saving and one for contributing to your community, church or cherished cause. Put 10% of your net earnings for the day in each account — see how good that feels? Try it again tomorrow, and the day after that.
Think about where you’ll be at this time next year: free of anxiety about money, with 10% of your net income saved for the purpose of bringing your dreams of the future to fruition, and an active, powerful force for good in the world.
Note: if you have high interest credit card debt that you can’t afford to pay off monthly, dedicate your 10% savings to paying off your highest interest credit card (on top of the minimum payments you’re already making. Once that’s done, start on the next-highest interest card, and so on, until you can begin saving for yourself. No less than the person with $100,000 in the bank, you’re on your way to freedom, one day at a time. Take the right step every day and the destination becomes inevitable.
If a bill comes in, celebrate the opportunity it give you to participate in the commercial flow of your community. Pay it promptly
It is a stormy night here in Vancouver (dare I say ‘dark and stormy’?) and my wind chimes are making beautiful music.
I had an interesting interview with a financial planner today, and we talked about the importance of cash flow management for people in the 25- to 46-year-old range. I agree wholeheartedly with his premise that understand how much you’re netting (that is, how much money lands in your bank account after deductions) versus how much your spending is the crux of long term financial peace, but it made me think, too, about how easy it is to spend.
I had dinner with someone I love recently — she’s 20, working in a low-paying job, and already in debt to a credit card company. (To the credit card company, by the way — that’s unconscionable.) As she said, it’s her fault — but in our society, blaming someone without financial maturity for wracking up available credit card debt is akin to blaming toddlers for eating the candy that Grandma leaves on the coffee table.
We spend to feel better. We spend to eat when we’re far from home or have no food in the pantry that’s readily prepared. We spend to feel stylish and well-turned-out at work. We spend because our friends are spending, because all those advertisements promise us happiness, beauty, youth and that we’ll smell better. We spend because we don’t have time to think.
Then when we overspend, some talking head will tell us it’s because we’ve made bad decisions. Oy!
If you’re outspending your pay cheque, or not accumulating the financial resources you need to fuel your dreams, forget about will power. Forget about discipline. Do you honestly thing that will power and self-discipline has a breath of a chance in the face of $41 billion a year in annual advertising spending?
But there is a way — you simply have to find those things you love more than the gratification of spending. First, find your joy. If you’re overspending, it is quite likely because you aren’t finding enough pleasure in your life. Think about what you love, and make a list of three things you love to do that don’t cost money — then carve out some time to do more of that. Pleasure and relaxation are necessities to us humans, and without them, we will self-destructively use whatever is at hand to stimulate those synapses. (If you love to shop, consider joining your local Freecycle, or visit a thrift store a few times a week to find what treasures the universe has in store for you there.)
Second, just as staying away from fast food restaurants is job one when working toward a healthy body weight, stay away from advertising. Instead of watching TV, record the shows you can’t miss on your VCR and then speed through the ads. Visit your library to rent DVDs and videos. And whatever you do, stay away from magazines, which are just catalogs with articles thrown in to confuse us while making us feel that perfectly normal thighs are humongous tree trunks.
On a trip to Alberta to see my family last week, I read Never Let Me Go, another literary treasure by Kazuo Ishiguro, also author of the extraordinary Remains of the Day.
As with Remains of the Day, Ishiguro gently introduces his reader to atrocity — the way atrocity can be understood, as the product of the best intentions of flawed human beings. (And aren’t we all flawed humans — well-intentioned — and perhaps, therefore, capable of atrocity?)
We are drawn into the world of a boarding school, as remembered by Kathy H., one of the students, with more fondness than seems warranted. Along the way we learn that Kathy and her fellow students are clones, produced for the purpose of providing organs to non-cloned humans, once they’ve grown to adulthood. The social scientists behind the clone/donor program have developed an ingenious education process that instills the rightness and inevitability of donorship in these sweetly presented youth, and the book ends with a kind of honeyed horror.
The characters accompanied me as I traveled the 1,000 or so miles from my father’s ranch to my home here by the ocean. Only today did the deeper resonance of the story make itself clear to me, as I read an article in the New York Times about payday loan companies, and the families that ruin themselves by taking small ($150 or $200) loans and paying fees and interest equivalent to more than 500% per year.
It occurred to me this afternoon that while Ishiguro may have intended his moral to be about the potential abuse of modern health science, our deeply indebted, consumption-addled society is also parallel to the one he’s created. While we don’t donate our organs, we give up something equally precious to the quality of our lives, our time.
We are ingeniously educated to believe that our worth can be measured in purchases, and are given the means to indenture ourselves through loans and credit cards. We then sell our time in an attempt to keep up — in essence, donating our lives for the profitability of financial institutions and the more superior humans who own them.
I know there is a positive moral in here somewhere — I could say something about how choosing a simpler life can quickly free us, or how we must encourage our leaders to stop financial cannibalism. But frankly, my heart is aching, and that motivational message will have to wait for another day.