How to Have More Money
How to Have More Money
Written by Jerrold Mundis | Published: 13 February 2012 – Updated: 18 November 2018
You can have more money. And you can have it — get it — without turning your life upside down or driving yourself nuts. Seriously. I got it that way, quietly, simply, and still am. You can, too. Maybe only a modest amount more, maybe a lot more. I don't know. But I do know that you can have more. I'm not doing anything so far as concept and technique go that you can't either. I just work the simple little four-point program that follows. You're welcome to it.
Here's what I do — and don't do. Never incur new unsecured debt
I don't debt and haven't for 28 years now.
I know: using debt as a verb is unlovely. But it helps to distinguish that act from other uses of money, to be clear about what is actually being done — not spending, buying, enjoying, but: going into debt.
Readers of Get Rich Slowly and other personal finance blogs almost certainly know that using unsecured credit is a bad idea. But I'll tell you: It's more than a bad idea. It's a catastrophe. If any single thing can crush, break, and poison a life, kill anything of value or pleasure in it, it's unsecured debt, the sustained and mounting pressure of it over months, years, and even decades.
In his play A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen wrote more than 130 years ago, “There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing or debt.”
True. I've never seen anyone for whom it isn't.
By the time I bottomed out on debt myself, way back in 1984, my marriage was over, my books were out of print, and my life shattered. I was waking up every morning with ground-glass in my stomach thinking, “Oh God, there's another bill coming in!” without any idea how I would ever be able to pay it. I was living in near constant pain and despair.
I was $113,000 in unsecured debt then (in today's dollars), had expenses of $3,000 a month and a guaranteed income of only $350 a month. It was clear, finally — made brutally clear to me by the misery, the anguish even — that this could not go on. So I stopped debting, cold turkey. Because I had to. Because I knew there was no other hope for me.
From that day in March of 1984 on, I did everything and anything I had to in order not to go one single dollar deeper into unsecured debt:
I sold things I owned.
I gave up my apartment and moved in with a friend.
I cut expenses to the bone, then cut into the bone.
I said yes not only to whatever kind of new literary or teaching work I could find, no matter how little it paid, but to any work.
Slowly, slowly, things began to get better.
It was out of that bottom and my recovery from it, out of not-debting, eventually paying off all that unsecured debt, and becoming free that I wrote my first book on personal money, How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously. It was the first book ever on that subject, to my best knowledge, and it's been in continuous print since 1988 (updated and expanded in 2003).
Now your circumstances may not be anywhere near as dire as mine were (at least I hope they aren't), but the fact remains: You cannot get out of debt by going deeper into it.
Nor will you be able to bring more money into your life — at least permanently, steadily — until you stop incurring any new unsecured debt. At best, that kind of debt will just continue to siphon money out of your life, relentlessly, and will be a nearly impenetrable barrier toward bringing more of it in. More that's yours to keep
So unless you can claim that you genuinely live free of any amount — any amount — for, say, at least 40 weeks out of every year (an only partly arbitrary number) . . . stop debting. Right now.
Understand that all economies are personal
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