How to Have More Money
My guest blog with that title,”How to Have More Money”—which offers a simple four-point program for doing just that, getting more money into your life—went up on the (deservedly) popular personal finance site Get Rich Slowly this morning.
You might well want to read it. You can do that either by clicking here or on the the name of the site in the paragraph above.
(And why wouldn’t you? It works!)
Enjoy!
Solvency as a Way of Life
Someone wrote me from another country last week, saying: “First of all, thank you for your book. It was a treasure for me. Five years ago I followed your method successfully but unfortunately now I am again to the same position.” She continued on with other comments, expressed some fear and doubt, and asked a couple of questions.
Here is how I replied:
Dear [Name],
Thank you for your email and for your kind words about my work. I’m glad it helped.
I’m sorry you now find yourself in difficult circumstances again. The thing is, [Name], this has to become a way of life. Otherwise, relapse is nearly always inevitable. Me, I can’t afford to incur so much as dollar’s worth of new unsecured debt — in any way, for any reason. Ever. And I haven’t for nearly 28 years now, regardless of how trying circumstances were at times.
(Which has resulted in a vastly better, more humane, happier and satisfying life for me.)
You can indeed do this again, regardless of the financial crisis in [the country in which she lives]. While not as severe as things are there, they aren’t particularly good here either. What’s important to know, no matter how hard it might be to comprehend at first, is that *all* economies are personal. While the macro economy will definitely shade and influence how I do things, my own economy is indeed just that, my own economy. It remains personal, and I can, and sometimes must, adapt, alter, and be innovative in what I do in response to changing contexts in order to sustain it in a healthy state.
Being freelance [as my correspondent is] presents its own unique set of challenges, but it also offers unique opportunities and freedoms not available to people with jobs or who are out of work and limited in the kind of employment that they can seek.
Still, for everyone, their economies are personal.
You might want to read my book Earn What You Deserve: How to Stop Underearning and Start Thriving for help with this. That book has not been translated into [her native language] yet, but your English is actually very good, despite your apprehensions about it, and I don’t think you would have any problem with the book.
You can find it here — http://amzn.to/oSn0UI — in both print and Kindle ebook editions.
Thanks again.
I wish you every happiness and success.
Be well,
Jerry
The $250 Phone Call
I was annoyed at having to make the damn call.
One common characteristic of debtors and underearners is that they delay endlessly filing for reimbursements to which they’re entitled, from insurance companies, employers, clients, and just about anyone else.
They can have literally thousands of dollars worth of these things backed up, sometimes for years.
A variation on this is a reluctance to question charges from a vendor or service provider they think might be wrong.
I don’t have a problem filing for reimbursements myself (though I did once), but my first response to being billed for something I think I might not owe is still to file the bill away and tell myself I’ll get to it later. Or even to just go ahead and pay it assuming I owe it or imagining that I’ll get around to disputing it later.
Mostly I feel exasperated about having to deal with it at all, that I’ll have to take time out my day and life for something I think I shouldn’t have to
But all this does, if I do stuff it into a pigeon hole on a shelf near my desk, or even worse just go ahead and pay it for now, is saddle me with some extra psychic baggage, a task undone, and the question of whether I owe money I hadn’t planned on having to spend or not.
Not good.
So when I opened up an envelope from the morning’s mail and found a bill for $250 for lab work I thought had been covered by my health insurance, I wasn’t happy about it, and was about to put it into the pigeon hole, thinking unhappily that I’d have to something about it next week.
But I didn’t. I picked up the phone. I dialed the number of the billing department, telling myself “It’ll be better, Jerry, it’ll be better if you do this now, even if costs you an hour out of your working day.”
And it was.
And it was even easy.
And all it took was less than five minutes, probably only four and maybe even three.
I got through almost immediately to a customer service agent who was cheerful, who brought up my account on her computer, asked me one clarifying question about my policy, then said they had made a mistake. She corrected it on the spot, wiping out the charge, thanked me for calling, and I thanked her, and we wished each other a happy New Year and said goodbye.
One quick phone call. $250 saved. A bunch of psychic debris avoided. And a lightness of being as I turned to the day’s writing.
The “Debt Book” Is Named One of the “Best Books”—Again. Nifty!
How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously has been named yet again as one of the best books on personal finance in print, this time by the highly regarded, award-winning personal finance blog Get Rich Slowly. (Click on that link to see the full list of books picked there as best.)
You can read what J.D. Roth—the founder of Get Rich Slowly—thinks of the book in his 2009 review of it by clicking here: review.
Roth happened to come upon the original 1988 edition of the book rather than the revised and updated 2003 one, but he points out (rightly in my point of view, and I appreciate him for it) that the concepts and techniques he found there are timeless as well as powerful and effective.
He has many very nice and complimentary things to say about the book, all of which I am grateful for. Again, if you wish to see his comments, you can find them here. (And if you’d like to see what some 80-plus readers have to say about it, you can find their comments on this page.)
If you do go to look at Roth’s review, and I hope you do, you might well be interested in reading some of the responses that his own readers have left to it, too.
Thanks, J.D. Roth!
How Not to Blow the Family Fortune or Get Yourself Even Deeper in Debt this Holiday Season
The holidays can be hard—especially financially, and especially for people for whom money is already tight. For people already carrying some amount of unsecured debt, who are behind in bills, or have a problem with spending, they can be devastating. Every year, the 12-step program Debtors Anonymous experiences a surge in membership starting around January 15th—as people begin to recognize just how much damage they did to themselves over Christmas, Chanukah, and more recently Kwanzaa.
Here’s a simple technique to help you keep the amount you spend on gift-buying manageable (sane). First, determine just how much you can reasonably spend on gifts this holiday—the total amount. (The key word here is reasonably.) Then:
1. List everyone to whom you want to give gifts.
2. Decide how much you’d like to spend on each person. You’ll want—and it will be proper—to spend more on some than others. What is essential here is that the total for all of them can’t be greater than the figure you came up with in step one.
3. Place the amount for each person, in cash, into a separate envelope and write his or her name onto it.
4. Take the envelopes with you when you do your present shopping.
Finally, do your shopping with your envelopes in hand (or in coat pocket or purse), spending no more on anyone than is in his or her envelope. It goes without saying or at least it should that you won’t be taking any credit cards with you when you set off to shop—not unless you want to end up even deeper in debt than you already are anyway. Best not even to take an ATM or debit card. Although using either of those two wouldn’t be debting (I like to use that word, debting, to make perfectly clear what the act actually is—incurring new debt), but both can tempt you to spend more than you truly want to or can afford.
You can use the same system for holiday entertaining. Decide on a total amount you’re willing to spend, put it in envelopes marked “Dinner Party at Home,” “Taking the In-Laws Out,” and the like, and then do your shopping or select a restaurant according to what’s in each envelope.
Do this and you’ll almost certainly wake up happy and solvent after the holidays with the family fortune still intact—or at least not simply another a day older and deeper and debt.
Another No-Brainer
I made a post back on July 4th that I considered a no-brainer—correlating Independence Day with freedom from debt—and here’s another one, albeit a week after the fact, that I consider the same.
Thanksgiving. Well, the obvious: In addition to everything else I have to be thankful for and which I like everyone else too often fail to be actively conscious of, from my two sons to the skylight at the top of the stairs of the modest duplex in Greenwich Village in which I live, down to the very fact that I am alive (what are the odds of that having happened in the vastness of the Universe?), I’m thankful that I don’t have a penny’s worth of unsecured debt in my life.
Fact, not even a penny’s worth of secured debt either. (Not that I object to secured debt—e.g. a mortgage or a car loan—although you can get into trouble with those too, but rather that I just don’t happen to have any of that at the moment.)
I don’t owe a dollar to anyone.
Remarkable. And what a truly lovely way to live.
And I am thankful for that.
This One’s for You, Nikko—and Thanks
Nikko wrote to me and asked flat out: “When are you going to update your blog?”
Well, today, Nikko. And thank you for the prompt. I got distracted by practicing what I preach (more about that in later posts) and became neglectful here—which is the one thing I didn’t want to happen when I created this site. Mea culpa. And my apologies.
But here I am again, and plan to be on a regular basis.
Nikko didn’t write simply to chide me but rather more to say some very nice things about my books How to Get out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously and Earn What You Deserve. One of which false modesty will not prevent me from quoting.
She said: “Your book is a nugget of pure gold.”
(But on the other hand, which one, Nikko? Or—the author asked hopefully—did you mean both?)
Anyway, thank you for summoning me back here, Nikko, and for your kind words. I appreciate both.
A Good Way to Use the Recommended Library
One good way to use the Recommended Library here is to build yourself a five-book, one-year reading and action plan from it.
Start with How to Get out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously (if debt is any kind of problem or source of discomfort for you) and use that as your foundation book. If debt isn’t much a problem for you, then pick another book from the list, the one that speaks the most directly to you, and use it as your foundation book.
Then study the list a bit more and pick four more books from it that you think are appropriate and that would be the most helpful to you.
Then get all five books in this personal library.
Rank your foundation book first, then list the remaining four in whatever order seems to you the most logical order or beneficial. .
Then: work with this five-book program of transformation for bettering both your life and your experience of it over the coming twelve months. If you actually do that, you can’t help but finish the period happier and more prosperous than you were when you started—and very possibly considerably so.
You’re won’t suffer anything new for not doing this, or lose anything more than you might have lost otherwise (if indeed you would have lost anything), but you’ll certainly see some very tangible and welcome gains for yourself if you do.
Old Habits Die Hard (Very Hard)
I went out to Pasadena to speak on healthy money, sit and answer questions, and give two workshops about a month ago now. I did this as service, with no payment, but my travel expenses were paid by the hosting organization.
Some of the airfare was paid in advance, as was my hotel bill. But I covered ground transportation and part of the airfare out of pocket, to be reimbursed at the end of the conference. These came to a few hundred dollars. The coordinator was ready to reimburse me on the spot, but I told her I didn’t know the exact amount, the receipts were in my already packed bag, and that I would make a PDF copy of them when I got back home and send it out to her as an email attachment.
Twice, she’s written to me over the past month, expressing her happy willingness to reimburse me.
And I have kept putting off the simple act of laying out the receipts on the glass of my flatbed scanner and creating a document that I could attach to a simple one or two sentence email, and get those few hundred dollars back into my pocket immediately. (We both use PayPal.)
Active debtors and underearners are notorious for not asking for reimbursement of their expenses, failing to file insurance forms that will bring them back sometimes even thousands of dollars, and—when self-employed—even for not sending out invoices to clients for work already completed, for months sometimes, in extreme cases not ever, out of embarrassment over for the amount of time that has passed.
Now, I haven’t incurred a dollar’s worth of new unsecured debt in nearly 30 years and I’m also the guy who wrote the book on how to overcome underearning.
But here I am, all these years later, still putting off a couple of simple acts that will take me 10 minutes at the most and probably closer to 5 that will increase my net worth by a few hundred dollars almost by return email.
Amazing.
I’m gong to do this before I go to bed tonight, shaking my head as I am at myself at the moment.
Old habits die hard sometimes. Very hard.
