."I’m Finally Making Money, But It Doesn’t Feel Great"

I’m Finally Making Money, But It Doesn’t Feel Great’

By Charlotte Cowles

The Cut’s financial advice columnist Charlotte Cowles answers readers’ personal questions about personal finance. Email your money conundrums to mytwocents@nymag.com

 Dear Charlotte,

For the first time in my life, I’m making a really good salary, and so is my husband. We’ve always been very careful with money. We both maxed out our 401(k)s and IRAs even when we made tiny starting salaries.

We have a healthy emergency fund and an investment account that we filled in our 20s. We have no children, a mortgage with a cheap monthly payment, and healthy parents who support themselves.

Now that we have all these extra funds, we could be saving a lot more, but instead we spend it on fun vacations and nice clothing. I went from a ten-year-old reliable Japanese car to a Tesla, and a random thrift-store purse to a super-nice one from France.

I’m a painter (not my day job) and have bought so much paint on sale that I could probably never buy paint again. Before I even got out of bed yesterday, I spent $450 on a warehouse sale from this brand I’ve become obsessed with. I buy clothes on Instagram constantly.

It’s like now that I have all this extra money, I feel like I’ve become this whole new person I don’t recognize. How can I go back to being someone who’s fine with mismatched plates and thrift-store items, instead of this trend follower with a perfect house filled with nice shit that doesn’t matter?

I understand why you miss your old life. It feels good to live simply and to work toward larger financial goals. The problem, it seems, is that you never really envisioned the life you’d lead once you actually accomplished those goals and had money to spare. Now that your discipline has paid off — you’ve not only attained financial stability, but actual wealth — you don’t know what to do with it.

Your spending feels wild and out of control because you identify as someone who usually shows more restraint. It sounds like you’re struggling to reconcile that responsible part of yourself with the one who wants to live a little — and now has the means to do so.

I suspect you may also be feeling a little bit lonely. Studies have found that upward mobility, particularly when it involves transitioning to a higher socioeconomic class, can be isolating because it moves people away from familiar social circles and into unfamiliar ones.

The research shows that this is especially pernicious among women and minorities because they have fewer mentors and models to look toward as they make their way up the income ladder. It’s also tough to talk about — having a surplus of money isn’t exactly a “problem,” nor a situation that most people can relate to.

Right now, it seems like you’ve been following a sort of rich-person life template that’s readily available on Instagram and social media. It’s a seductive world of handwoven throw pillows and tasteful ceramics, and it’s also a bottomless money pit. Still, it doesn’t seem like you’ve gone off the rails.

I get the feeling that you see yourself as someone spraying hundred-dollar bills out of a grenade launcher, but let’s look at reality. You bought a purse, some clothes, paint on sale, and an environmentally-friendly car that will save you gas money over the years? Cut yourself some slack, and chalk it up to a learning experience.

You don’t necessarily need to save more — it seems like you’re doing fine in that department. Instead, you need to find a new source of the virtuous feeling that you used to get from socking money away, and that involves exploring new things to do with it. In other words, you should spend some time rethinking your priorities now that you have more money to spend on them.

To continue reading, please go to the original article at

https://www.thecut.com/2019/08/im-finally-making-money-but-it-doesnt-feel-great.html

.Why America’s Families Are Struggling Financially

Why America’s Families Are Struggling Financially

The finances of Americans may not be as good as they look from the outside.

Despite optimistic metrics like a nine-year-long bullish, if volatile, stock market, higher than expected job and wage growth, and consumer confidence levels nearing record highs, millions of Americans continue to struggle, a study released last week from financial consultancy nonprofit the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) found.

Only 28% of Americans are considered “financially healthy,” according to a CFSI survey of more than 5,000 Americans. “Financial health enables family stability, education, and upward mobility, not just for individuals today but across future generations,” the CFSI says. “Many are dealing with an unhealthy amount of debt, irregular income, and sporadic savings habits.”

Meanwhile, 17% of Americans are “financially vulnerable,” meaning they struggle with nearly all financial aspects of their lives, and 55% are “financially coping,” meaning they struggle with some but not all aspects of their financial lives.

The recent volatility in the Dow Jones Industrial DJIA, +0.17%  and S&P 500 SPX, -0.02%  has not helped Americans feel secure, experts say.

These findings are based on the CFSI Financial Health Score, a framework designed by CFSI to measure financial health more holistically by examining spending, saving, credit, and other indicators.

Some 44% of respondents said their expenses exceeded their income in the past year and they used credit to make ends meet. Another 42% said they have no retirement savings at all.

They come on the heels of a previous study from personal-finance site Bankrate.com that found only 29% of Americans had 6 months or more of emergency savings and a nearly equal percentage said they had none. Indeed, most Americans would not be able to pay for an emergency expense of $1,000, a separate 2015 study showed.

The median American household currently holds just $11,700 in savings, according to a recent analysis of Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. data by personal-finance site Magnify Money.

The top 1% of households in the U.S. by income have a median savings of $1.1 million across a variety of saving accounts. The bottom 20% by income have no savings accounts and the second lowest 20% income earners have just $26,450 saved.

To continue reading, please go to the original article at

https://pulsedailynews.com/2019/09/why-americas-families-are-struggling-financially/?listab_list=listab_list

.10 Steps To Become A Millionaire

10 Steps To Become A Millionaire

In 5 Years  (Or Less)

By Benjamin Hardy PhD

"A lot of people think we are creatures of habit but we're not. We are creatures of environment." — Roger Hamilton

“Become a millionaire not for the million dollars, but for what it will make of you to achieve it.” — Jim Rohn

Hey!

Money is a means to far more important ends.

However, if you don't have clear financial goals—which you track, measure, and report consistently—then you certainly won't hit them.

If you don't have specific and stretching financial goals, it's likely due to limiting beliefs and a fixed mindset.

In this article, I detail a simple (and realistic) 10 Steps To Become A Millionaire In 5 Years (Or Less)

You can do this.  Have an epic week!

It doesn’t matter where you currently are in your financial situation — whether just starting out or already making lots of money.

 Most people, no matter what their income, are treading water. As a person’s income rises, so does their spending.

 Few people understand how to continually increase their income, lifestyle, and joy at the same time.

 In this article, you will learn:

 How to become wealthy

 How to build a life that continually increases your level of confidence and joy

 How to continually expand, learn, grow, and succeed as a person

 How to develop mentorships, friendships, and strategic partnerships with nearly anyone you want

 If these things are not interesting to you, then this article was not written for you.

 Here’s how it works:

 1.  Create A Wealth Vision

 “When riches begin to come they come so quickly, in such great abundance, that one wonders where they have been hiding during all those lean years.” — Napoleon Hill

 Step one of becoming financially successful is to actually create a vision for yourself financially. Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. Arden said creativity is more important than experience.

 How much imagination do you have for your future?

 Do you see huge potential and possibility for your life?

 Or, do you see a pretty average life?

 Creating a vision is an iterative process. You don’t just create a vision once and then never look at it again.

 You continually create and write your vision — every single day.

 Lok at any area of your life in which you’re doing well, and you’ll find it’s because you see something beyond what you currently have. By that same token, look at any area of your life that isn’t exceptional, and you’ll find that you don’t see something beyond what you currently have.

 Most people are living in and repeating the past.

 Having a vision is focused on the future.

Your life and behavior immediately shift when you begin imagining a different future and stridently strive for it.

 In order to do this, you must obliterate your need for consistency. From a psychological perspective, people generally feel the need to be viewed by others as consistent. This need causes people to retain behavioral patterns, environments, and relationships that are ultimately destructive and unsatisfying for far too long.

To continue reading, please go to the original article at

https://benjaminhardy.com/10-steps-to-become-a-millionaire-in-5-years-or-less-4/

.What I Learned From Losing $200 Million

What I Learned From Losing $200 Million

The 2008 financial crisis taught me about the illusion of control, and how to give it up.

By Bob Henderson   December 24, 2015

I’d lost almost $200 million in October.  November wasn’t looking any better.

It was 2008, after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Markets were in turmoil. Banks were failing left and right. I worked at a major investment bank, and while I didn’t think the disastrous deal I’d done would cause its collapse, my losses were quickly decimating its commodities profits for the year, along with the potential pay of my more profitable colleagues. I thought my career could be over. I’d already started to feel those other traders and salespeople keeping their distance, as if I’d contracted a disease.

My eyes started to fill from a sudden wash of gratitude and relief that came, I think, from no longer being alone.

I landed in London on the morning of November 4, having flown overnight from New York. I was a derivatives trader, but also the supervisor of the bank’s oil options trading team, about a dozen guys split between Singapore, London, and New York. Until this point I’d managed the deal almost entirely on my own, making the decisions that led to where I ... we ... were now.

But after a black cab ride from Heathrow to our Canary Wharf office, I got the guys off the trading floor and into a windowless conference room and confessed: I’d tried everything, but the deal was still hemorrhaging cash. Even worse, it was sprouting new and thorny risks outside my area of expertise.

In any case, the world was changing so quickly that my area of expertise was fast becoming obsolete. I pleaded for everyone to pitch in. I said I was open to any ideas.

As I spoke, I noticed that one of the guys had tears welling up in his eyes. I paused for a second, stunned. Then my own eyes started to fill from a sudden wash of gratitude and relief that came, I think, from no longer being alone.

Stress testing is a standard technique derivatives traders use to test how their portfolio will perform in an imagined “worst-case” scenario. The problem is that “worst-case” is subjective, making stress testing as much of an art as a science, and exposing the trader doing the testing to something called the “illusion of control.”

The psychologist Ellen Langer coined the phrase in 1975 to describe “an expectancy of personal success probability inappropriately higher than the objective probability would warrant.”

Experimental evidence for the illusion goes back at least to 1965, when one research team found that college-educated employees of AT&T asked to press buttons to illuminate lights had the tendency to believe they had more control than they actually did, even when the lights lit randomly, and even when they used pen and paper to track their results.

In another study, done in 1992, a group of Israeli college students was found to be more willing to bet on dice, and to bet bigger, before they rolled than after, reflecting the belief that they had control over their rolls. Such a preference for prediction over postdiction had been observed before, but this study also found that the preference grew stronger when the students were threatened with an electric shock if they guessed wrong—evidence that stress amplifies the illusion of control.

Langer’s work showed that the illusion is also intensified by “skill cues”: circumstances that make people feel like they’re engaged in acts of skill rather than luck. Such cues include competition, choice, and familiarity with the task at hand.

Therefore people will tend to overestimate their prospects in a game of pure chance even more than usual if they face a nervous-looking opponent, or if they pick rather than get assigned a lottery ticket, or if they’re given the chance to familiarize themselves with an apparatus that’s simply spitting out random numbers.

Or, I might add, if they’ve toiled over complicated mathematical equations to back up their decisions.

I thought I knew what I was getting into. I’d helped my bank win the fateful deal by developing a complex option on crude oil, together with a risk management strategy. My equations told me how I could buy and sell simpler financial products over time to approximately offset my daily gains and losses on the option I’d sold.

To continue reading, please go to the original article at

http://nautil.us/issue/31/stress/what-i-learned-from-losing-200-million

.Here’s Every Reason To Avoid Buying A Gold ETF

Notes From The Field By Simon Black

September 9, 2019  Bahia Beach, Puerto Rico

Here’s Every Reason To Avoid Buying A Gold ETF

Buckle up, this one’s going to be entertaining… because I should have called this note “Why you should always read the fine print.”

This morning I read through the prospectus and annual reports of the most popular Gold ETFs in the world.

First, some background:

ETF stands for ‘exchange-traded fund’. It’s sort of like a mutual fund that’s listed on the stock exchange, meaning investors can buy/sell shares of an ETF just like they would buy/sell shares of Apple, Ford, or (God help us) Netflix.

But unlike Apple, which is an operating business with employees, products, revenue, etc., an ETF is NOT an operating business. It’s a fund that merely pools capital to own assets.

The benefit for investors is that ETFs can be an easy and convenient way to invest in certain assets which would otherwise be difficult to buy.

If someone wants to buy Egyptian stocks, for example-- they could open a brokerage account in Cairo… or buy an Egypt ETF that’s listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

The ETF is a LOT easier for most investors.

But there are also ETFs for gold and silver. And I find this mystifying.

We’re not talking about Egyptian stocks. Gold and silver are easy to buy. You could have Canadian Maple Leaf gold coins delivered to your home with a few mouse clicks.

So gold ETFs provide no added convenience.

Yet there’s an enormous amount of downside.

First off-- it’s important to know that if you buy an ETF, you’re paying for a ton of unnecessary expenses.

The ETF has to pay custodian fees, marketing fees, listing fees to the New York Stock Exchange, audit fees, management fees, etc.

I’m chairman of the Board of Directors for a company that’s listed on a stock exchange, and trust me-- the listing fees are REALLY expensive.

If you own physical gold in your own safe, you wouldn’t have to suffer the cost of paying lawyers, auditors, and investment bankers.

But GLD does. Which means that as a GLD investor, YOU are fundamentally paying those costs.

And remember that ETFs aren’t operating businesses. Apple makes money selling overpriced hardware. But GLD has no products, and hence doesn’t generate any revenue.

To continue reading, please go to the original article at

https://www.sovereignman.com/investing/heres-every-reason-to-avoid-buying-a-gold-etf-25548/

To your freedom & prosperity, Simon Black Founder, SovereignMan.com

.The Relative Value of Money

The Relative Value of Money

By Kevin  Financial Panther

There’s a concept that I’ve been thinking about over the past couple of years, especially as I’ve made this transition from a full-time, professional, real job, to a quasi-fake job as a blogger and gig economy worker. It has to do with a concept you could call the relative value of money.

When I think about what that means, it’s basically the idea that money you earn from one activity might be worth more to you personally compared to the money you earn from another activity.

In fact, it might be worth so much more to you that you’ll opt to spend your days earning money in that manner even if it means you’re making less money from an objective standpoint. This concept has really come into clearer focus to me over the past few years and I think it helps explain why I’ve made a lot of the work decisions I’ve made.

One of the weird things I’ve done consistently over the past few years is doing pretty low-level side hustles using sharing economy and gig economy apps. From an objective standpoint, it really didn’t make much sense for me to do all of this stuff. At the peak of my lawyer career, I was making $300 or more per day from my salary, obviously more than enough to live very comfortably.

And yet, even though I made all of this money, I still chose to spend my spare hours doing silly things like delivering food to people on my bike and selling stuff I found in the trash.

The common criticism I’d get was that doing this stuff was a waste of my time. The better use of my time would be to focus on my job and continue to progress in my legal career. Eventually, I could try to become a partner somewhere or just do something to continue to increase my salary, or at least to increase my prestige.

In truth, that’s probably what I should have done, at least if we’re looking at pure numbers. I could obviously make much more money as a lawyer than I could from all of the stupid things I was doing. But the few bucks I made doing my random gig stuff felt so much more valuable and rewarding to me compared to any dollar I earned from my regular paycheck.

The thing I’ve learned to value more and more is control over my life. I suspect that’s something a lot of people on the path to financial independence value too.

The money I made from my day job, however, was the exact opposite of control over my life. I had to be at the office at a certain time, do things that other people told me to do, and basically, plan my life around my job. It made me feel trapped.

A dollar might have the same objective value no matter how you choose to earn it. But how you personally value that dollar is another matter. I think that’s worth thinking about.

Thinking About The Relative Value Of Money

One of the podcasts I listen to pretty regularly is Tropical MBA, which I highly recommend you listen to if you’re the entrepreneurial type looking for some help and motivation.

To continue reading, please go to the original article at

https://financialpanther.com/the-relative-value-of-money/

.How Lincoln Triumphed in an Era Even More Toxic Than Ours

How Lincoln Triumphed in an Era Even More Toxic Than Ours

Allen Barra  Published 09.08.19 5:32AM ET

Biographer Sidney Blumenthal talks to The Daily Beast about a pre-Civil War America where Jefferson Davis demanded both Lincoln and Douglas be lynched.

Abraham Lincoln doesn’t make much of an appearance in Sidney Blumenthal’s All the Powers of Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Volume III, 1856-1860 until around page 180, entering his own story almost as if through a side door.

Then, with rapidly gathering momentum, he becomes the story, which is Lincoln’s masterful negotiation of the political, economic, and social currents that swept him into the White House in 1860 and inevitably took America into the Civil War.

All the Powers of Earth is the third of a proposed five volumes unique in American historical writing. focusing on the rise of Lincoln as a political animal in a national climate shaped by early 19th century giants Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and Henry Clay with increasing tensions over slavery—tensions exacerbated by such men as Jefferson Davis, Stephen Douglas, and John Brown.

Blumenthal has written more than a dozen books on American politics and history, beginning with the prescient The Permanent Campaign about politicians who campaign for reelection throughout an electoral cycle, leaving little time for governing. (Sound familiar?)

He has written extensively about politics for the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the New Republic, often using insight gained from the inside of the political world as an aide to President Bill Clinton.

He took time to answer at length 15 questions on the massive (757 pages) fascinating volume.

Early in All the Powers of Earth, you write about “The great Triumvirate of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun, the representative political men of their age.” Clay,you write, “invented the power of Speaker of the House.” I did not know this—can you elaborate a bit?

Also, I like your phrase that Clay was “Lincoln’s beau ideal of a statesman.” What do you think was Clay’s biggest influence on Lincoln?

Yes, Lincoln had a hero, but then he cast him aside, and finally he vindicated him. Henry Clay, the original “self-made man” in American politics, came from a poor family in Virginia, moved to Kentucky, and proclaimed himself the “Western Star.”

Lincoln, another self-made man, emulating his “beau ideal,” dubbed himself the “Lone Star of Illinois,” but over time his hero worship became complicated even as he deployed Clay’s legacy for his own purposes.

After serving as Speaker of the House in the Kentucky legislature, Clay was elected to the U.S. House, where he was immediately chosen Speaker and became the leader of the War Hawks that engineered the War of 1812. He revolutionized the office, which previously had been a parliamentary one settling points of order.

To continue reading, please go to the original article at

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-lincoln-triumphed-in-an-era-even-more-toxic-than-ours?source=articles&via=rss 

.Why Founding Fathers Were Strapped for Cash

Washington Was Broke? Why Founding Fathers Were Strapped for Cash

Washington needed a job.

Historian Willard Sterne Randall on the forefathers’ financial struggles.

In March 1789, as he prepared to leave his beloved Mount Vernon and drive to his first inauguration in New York City, George Washington dashed off letters to his closest friends and nephews. Washington had not sought the presidency, preferring, after 15 years of warfare, to rusticate in retirement and tend his Potomac acres.

To Henry Knox, his old comrade-in-arms, he wrote, “My movements to the chair of government will be accompanied with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.” But Washington had more than an abiding sense of civic duty drawing him back into public life: he was broke.

To his favorite nephew, George Augustine Washington, he confided in writing on March 31 what many of his old friends already knew: “Necessity (if this [his unanimous election] had not happened) would have forced me into (frugality) as my means are not adequate to the expense at which I have lived since my retirement to what is called private life.” In other words, he needed the job.

Recent news coverage comparing the assets and income of Mitt Romney with America’s presidents have wildly overstated the wealth of the Founding Fathers, who should be more appropriately labeled the Foundering Fathers.

What the oft-quoted ranking of presidential fortunes by the gurus at 24/7 Wall Street completely misconstrues is that early Americans lived in a largely cashless society, where millions of acres were virtually worthless because nobody had any cash to buy or even rent them.

The 24/7 report asserts that George Washington was far and away the richest of all presidents because he owned 60,000 acres and 300 slaves. In fact, he managed 35,000 acres that was largely on the frontiers of western Pennsylvania and present-day West Virginia, where many of his former Revolutionary War troops were his cashless tenants, unable to pay their rent.

Washington had lost half of his net worth in the revolution. He refused to accept any pay for his eight years as commander in chief. Paying his own expenses and feeding his staff of up to 16 hungry officers at every meal, he also shelled out for a network of some 500 spies in gold.

When he put in his expense account at war’s end, Congress only blinked once, quibbling about $8, and reimbursing paying him $100,000-plus. In worthless Continental dollars that had depreciated by 9,000 percent since 1776.

To continue reading, please go to the original article at

https://www.thedailybeast.com/washington-was-broke-why-founding-fathers-were-strapped-for-cash

.Financial Lessons of America’s Founding Fathers

Financial Lessons of America’s Founding Fathers

By Jacob Davidson

In theory, the founding fathers should be the ultimate financial role models. After all, they’re literally on the money. Warren Buffett might be every investor’s hero, but he can’t count his earnings without seeing the faces of Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, and Jefferson.

And even John Adams, perhaps the most neglected of the founding fathers, has been commemorated on the dollar coin.

What can the men who adorn our currency teach us about our own finances? Quite a lot, actually, but not because they were all as good with money as they were at creating a nation.

Here are some of the lessons, still applicable today, that can be drawn from these historic financial lives.

Have a Back-up Plan

Alexander Hamilton may have been the greatest financial visionary in American history.

After the Revolutionary War, as Washington’s Treasury Secretary, Hamilton steered the fledgling nation out of economic turmoil, ensured the U.S. could pay back its debts, established a national bank, and set the country on a healthy economic path.

But it turned out that he was far better at managing the country’s finances than his own

When Hamilton was killed in a duel with vice president Aaron Burr, his relatives found they were broke without his government salary. Willard Sterne Randall, biographer of multiple founding fathers, recounts that Hamilton’s wife was forced to take up a collection at his funeral in order to pay for a proper burial.

What went wrong? Hamilton’s law practice had made him wealthy and a government salary paid the bills once he moved to Washington, but he also had seven children and two mistresses to support. Those expenses, in addition to his spendthrift ways, left Hamilton living from paycheck to paycheck.

The take-away: Don’t stake your family’s financial future on your current salary. The Amicable Society pioneered the first life insurance policy in 1706, well before Hamilton’s demise in 1804, andterm life insurance remains an excellent way to provide for loved ones in the event of an untimely death. Also, don’t get into duels. Life insurance usually doesn’t cover those.

Diversify Your Assets

Conventional wisdom holds that investors shouldn’t put all their eggs in one basket, and our nation’s first president prospered by following this truism.

During the early 18th century, Virginia’s landed gentry became rich selling fine tobacco to European buyers.

To continue reading, please go to the original article at

http://money.com/money/2946473/financial-lessons-of-americas-founding-fathers/

.Should You Always “Protect The Principal?”

Should You Always “Protect The Principal?”

By Khe Hy   the creator of RadReads

Elon Musk was nearly broke in 2008, borrowing money from his homies to cover his rent. “About four months ago, I ran out of cash,” he stated during his divorce proceedings. His brother Kimball confirmed his precarious position, “Oh yeah. [He’s] in debt. More than broke.”

And then-girlfriend, Talulah Riley remarked on his physical condition: “I remember thinking this guy would have a heart attack and die. He seemed like a man on the brink.”

Yet six years earlier, Musk had personally pocketed a whopping $220 million when eBay bought Paypal. How on earth could he possibly end up in such dire straights? Why didn’t he protect the principal?

We all grows up with aphorisms that define our relationship with money. You’ve all heard folksy phrases like “Money doesn’t matter” or “If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it?” And when it comes to protecting your baseline, even farmers know that you shouldn’t “eat your seed corn.”

Yet despite having hundreds of millions in the bank, Musk chose to put the principal at risk – every ** penny – because he didn’t want to pick a favorite between Tesla and SpaceX. He told Bloomberg’s Ashlee Vance:

“If I split the money, maybe both of them would die. If I gave the money to just one company, the probability of it surviving was greater, but then it would mean certain death for the other company.”

Putting all the principal on the line has paid off famously for Musk. But would that work if you had a smaller amounts of assets in the bank? Yes, protecting the principal seems like prudent strategy. But it can also be a self-limiting strategy when it comes to changing careers, becoming an entrepreneur and investing.

We should all lose our brokerage account passwords

In my money coaching practice, I ask my clients “If I stole 15% from your investment accounts, would you notice?” There’s the rare “Hellz yeah” from the penny-tracker whose multi-tabbed spreadsheet monitors the movement of every Latté. However, most clients wouldn’t notice this larceny for a handful of reasons.

Some know that the monthly and quarterly movements don’t matter (and that the best investors are those who forget that they even have an account).

Others (especially those with kids) may have lumpier expenses (i.e. tuition, life insurance, summer vacations) that obfuscate any linearity of cash flows. And finally, there’s also the avoiders, who explicitly choose not to know.

If you’re investing, your assets bounce around (sometimes a lot)

So if we accept that one’s net worth will bounce around, why is it that when faced with a life transition, our anchoring bias kicks in. In the same way we anchor to our “buy” price in refusing to sell a stock or home that’s lost some value, when we change careers we anchor to an imaginary red line. We protect the principal.

The longer I’ve been an entrepreneur, the less I care about protecting the principal. And it’s not because I’ve made more money (in fact, I haven’t.) I recently received an email from a concerned and puzzled RadReader about my decision to stay in the red — to fund RadReads out of my savings. Having been in similar shoes, he wrote:

How do you reconcile the values of independence and duty to family with not breaking even for so long. I believe that I owe it to my family to run my business at a cash profit every year, even though I could afford not to turn a profit for a while.

As he continued, I could relate to the tension between my own fulfillment and the sense of duty I have (particularly as the sole breadwinner) to my family:

To continue reading, please go to the original article at

https://radreads.co/protect-principal/

.If Money Could Talk

If Money Could Talk

 By Greg Habstritt

 A Powerful Perspective You’ve Never Heard Before – "If Money Could Talk"

Most people think they know me.   They don’t.

I am not what most people think I am. I am not the paper in your wallet, or the coins that jingle in your purse. I am not quietly sitting in your bank account, hoping to be used one day.

You cannot see me, feel me or touch me.

I am an idea. I am energy.

I’m neither good nor evil. I am only what you decide that I am, and I fulfill the role that you create for me.

I don’t care how smart you are, where you live, what you do, or where you come from. 

All I care about is your energy.

Your energy decides what thoughts you have, and therefore your thoughts will determine the relationship you have with me.

I have very simple needs, and simple rules. 

I am infinite.

I have no limits, except for those you place on me with your mind. There is no limit to the energy in the world, and because I am simply energy, I cannot be restricted or controlled.

I crave abundance.

I am attracted to those who think without restrictions, who like to think big. When you believe there is enough of me to go around, I am naturally magnetized by that thinking.

I despise scarcity.

Because there is no limit to me, I avoid those who think from a win/lose or scarcity perspective. Those who believe I am in short supply, or difficult to receive, will find that very reality, because I choose to avoid those who think small.

To continue reading, please go to the original article at

http://museologies.blogspot.com/2011/10/if-money-could-talk.html