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.
Independence Day
This one is kind of a no-brainer. I haven’t owed a dime to anybody, for anything, for years. What an astonishing pleasure, and how enormous a freedom that is! My own independence, my own revolution, began when I stopped incurring unsecured debt one day at a time—in any way, in any amount, for any reason.
That was 27 years ago last March.
And I’ve never looked back since, never regretted a day of that. Even when it was terrifying and unbelievably difficult.
It simply would have been worse if I had elected to go deeper into debt (in the days when I was still carrying some) or to have gone in anew once I was out—and started the whole same sad story all over again.
And the reward for having walked that path, even when it was hard—damn hard, in fact—and painful, have been wonderful, extraordinary actually. Far beyond the capacities of anyone who is still out there debting, I think, even to imagine.
Happy Independence Day. To me, you, and anyone else who stops incurring new unsecured debt and begins to turn his or her life around, to get free, truly free.
It’s a wonderful thing.
Colleagues and Community
I’m a guy who has spent a good deal of his life sitting alone in a room thinking. That’s what you do when you’re a writer, sit alone in a room and think. Over the years, that has resulted in a bit more than 40 novels and books of nonfiction and maybe 100 short stories, essays and articles.
And even a one-act children’s play. (Who knew?)
I enjoy being alone. I enjoy solitude, a lot. Which does not mean I do not engage with the world—I most certainly do—but rather that I simply have not only a high tolerance for but actually take pleasure in being by myself: in stillness, in silence, in solitude.
Still, like most people who are like me, I have to exercise some care that solitude and working alone do not deteriorate into isolation. Which is counterproductive, and even hurtful, on just about every level one can imagine.
I was thinking about that just moments ago, as I made ready to firm up a dinner date this week with colleague, a fellow writer and old friend. And as I saw a reminder on my calendar that I have a conference call scheduled for tomorrow night at 10 pm with four other people who are professionals working in other areas than I, but with whom I share some financial and other practices and with whom I interact collegially and supportively.
Those are important to me, colleagues and community. I think they are for everyone who is self-employed in some fashion, and especially for those who work alone or do so more often than not.
And Now I’m Even Tweeting, for God’s Sake
I am now officially on Twitter, as @JerroldMundis.
Who’d have thought? Certainly not I.
On the other hand, when I moved my young family up to the mountains 125 miles north of the city way back in 1971, into an old lodge in a mountain valley that we converted into our home (yes, Virginia, the ’60s and ’70s were real, and some of us actually lived them), we didn’t even have a private telephone line there, couldn’t get one for another year, and the best a television set could do was bring in two channels and sometimes, fuzzily, a third.
And I was writing books on a typewriter.
Imagine.
So why am I now on Twitter? Well, why not? And it seems—if I wish to keep writing books (I do), and keep offering coaching (I do), and continue to help people make peace with money and come to live happily with it (which I also do)—that it’s one of the things I need to be doing these days.
And who am I to buck history, technology, and galloping change?
But the damndest thing, ever since I got on Twitter, I haven’t been able to get the refrain of the old children’s song out of my mind: “and all the little birdies go tweet, tweet, tweet.”
And of course trying not to think about it pretty much guarantees that I’ll never get it out of my head. If you want to see the lyrics to the whole song—all the little squirrels go chatter, chatter, chatter. . . all the little frogs go ribet, ribet, ribet . . . and the rest—you can find them here. And even listen to them if you want.
Maybe I’ll tweet about it.
Time Magazine Ranks the Debt Book 2nd in List of Top Ten Personal Finance Books
On June 16th, Time magazine ranked my book How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously 2nd in their list of Top Ten Personal Finance Books. I am, understandably, I think, quite happy with this.
My publisher was thrilled with it.
And everyone who bought and worked with the book over the years, and got themselves out of debt and into a happy and peaceful life with money, was—I have no doubt—pleased to see their judgment confirmed.
That is, if they noticed the listing.
Some were probably out trekking though the Himalayas, lounging on a beach in Maui, ogling penguins in Antarctica, or otherwise enjoying the fruits of their solvency and abundance.
Here’s to us all.
And thank you, Time.
Sometimes the Magic Works (Part 2)
. . . and sometimes the magic doesn’t.
So there I was last Thursday with the temperature at 97 degrees here in New York and the heat index at 117, with the air-conditioning humming away in my apartment at least. I’d gotten up at 6 am to finish necessary tasks prior to leaving, had finished them, and was ready to leave at 3:30 pm when the driver from the car service called from downstairs.
I decided to wear shorts and a T-shirt out to the airport and change into my traveling clothes out there, the heat and humidity being so brutal I figured I’d be drenched in sweat by the time I got down the three flights of steps in the non-air-conditioned hall of this 175-year-old Federal building in GreenwichVillage.
That worked well, and I took a seat at the gate and read on my Kindle for an hour before boarding at 6 pm for my flight to the Burbank airport north of Los Angeles.
But about 6:15, lightning-thick thunderstorms hit the city. We taxied out and queued up waiting for takeoff anyway and there we sat encapsulated in our Airbus 320 while the storms raged above us for 2 hours and 40 minutes–till it headed back to the terminal, as per new FAA regulations that don’t allow passengers to be held in a plane for more than three hours.
And there we waited for a bit less than an hour while the plane was refueled (after the lightning died down), followed by a reboarding.
This time we sat on the concrete for a bit more than two hours, finally taking off about 12:40 am, some six hours later than planned.
I don’t sleep well on airplanes, in fact mostly not at all. And that both my seat mates, who apparently didn’t share that with me, and slept soundly most of the way, left the television screens on the backs of the seats in front them on and flashing didn’t help much either. Nor did the cone of light that spilled over onto me from the overhead light of the dedicated reader behind me.
I’d called one of my contacts in Pasadena from the airport during our refueling and told him that though I’d try, I might well not be able to make the short talk I was supposed to give to a group of solvent entrepreneurs the next day at 1 pm.
In the air, As we passed the 6 am mark New York time, droning on at 36,000 feet, I did the best I could with continuing to let go and allowing my body to try to find at least some amount of rest.
Now, meditation is not something you practice in order to induce sleep. It is essentially a state of relaxed awareness, of clarity, of presence. But I used a kind of dumbed down and cereal-box form of it, along with progressive body relaxation, to drain some of the weariness away, which was rapidly approaching exhaustion. I followed my breath, but only loosely, without concentration, on each exhale simply said silently, “Rest.” Or, switching after a while, “Peace.” And alternated between the two.
And with that, along with the extra-leg-room seat I had booked, for which I was then deeply grateful, I managed to avoid complete depletion.
And we landed at Burbank at a bit after 4 am local time, 7 am New York time. I was in my hotel by 4:30 am local time, and it was 5:30 by the time I was checked in, unpacked, and washed up. I had now been up going on 26 hours straight. I wanted to speak for these people at 1 pm, but knew that I simply couldn’t, that I couldn’t grab four or five hours sleep, get up, get to where I needed to be, speak, then get back to the hotel and get ready for the keynote speech I had to deliver that night at the opening of the three-day retreat I was scheduled into, and what’s more then sit as one part of a two-person panel and take questions for an hour and a half more.
Sometimes the magic works, sometimes the magic doesn’t.
So I surrendered. I gave up. I let go of my self-will and accepted that I just couldn’t manage this. I called my contact—I knew he’d be asleep, with his bell off, and that his voicemail would pick up—and told him that I couldn’t make it, please give everyone my apologies and tell them I would try to make it up to them somehow later.
I’m glad I was able to find what measure of rest I could on the flight, after a long, demanding day, glad I have experience in ways to do that. And glad that I know how to surrender when finally it becomes clear that simply trying to bull my way through isn’t going to work, is only going to hurt me. That I know how to let go.
Which is something I had to learn a long time ago, and am glad that I did. Even though I take it right up to the edge on occasion. But not over, thankfully. Not over. Not anymore.
Sometimes the Magic Works
. . . and sometimes the magic doesn’t.
This morning, having taken the red-eye back from California last night, I arrived back home here in New York, in my apartment, a little after 8:00 am.
Last week, Thursday night, my flight from JFK out to California was supposed to have taken off at 6:30 pm Eastern time, arrived in California at 11:00 pm Pacific time. Decent timing: I would have reached my hotel in Pasadena half an hour later, got myself checked in, unpacked, washed up, and been in bed by 12:30 am.
I would have been wakened by a wake-up call at 8:15 Friday morning refreshed, had plenty of time to shower, get breakfast, have a leisurely morning, make a 1:00 pm appointment where I was to speak to a small group for a little while, have had time in the afternoon to work on the two workshops I was going to present on Saturday and Sunday at the retreat where I was scheduled, grab a light supper, and be on time for a keynote speech I had to give at the retreat that night, followed by a two-person panel during which I and the other panelist would take questions from the retreat participants for an hour so.
A clear and doable plan.
That’s not what happened, though. About which I’ll write some more over the next couple of days.
Sometimes the magic works, sometimes the magic doesn’t.
Either way, the days pass.
Giving It Away
I’m on my way out to California to speak and lead two small workshops on healthy money at a private three-day retreat. This is service rather than professional work, though it involves much of the same kind of thing I do professionally for groups and corporations.
Giving, generosity, service, however you think of this kind of thing is good to do, mostly for yourself. It helps make sense of your life in general, break a scarcity mindset, a bombshelter mentality, the kind that tells you that you don’t have enough money, time, energy, or other resources to survive on in the first place, that you have to hang onto everything as if it were the very last crust of bread or drink of water you’ll ever see.
Happily, other people get benefit out of it too.
On the other hand, underearners can go overboard with giving themselves away, and often do. In fact, it’s one of the traits you find most frequently in underearners.
Lynne Block, Larry’s wife, with whom I was chatting after Larry read at the “Partners and Crime” mystery bookstore here last week, asked me how much I was getting paid for this.
“Nothing,” I said. “This is service.”
“Ah,” she said with a bit of a wicked smile. “Seems to me that’s a near perfect example of underearning.”
She knows I wrote the book on underearning, literally.
Could be, in some other circumstances. It’s not in this one.
While it is the kind of thing that underearners do again and again, it is also simultaneously the kind of thing that people with a scarcity mentality, a bombshelter sense of life, can scarcely even conceive of doing.
It ends up a nice middle in this case. Which is one of the reasons I’m doing it. To help keep a healthy balance.
“I’d Rather Die than Give Up My Maid”
I heard a woman say that once: “I’d rather die than give up my maid.”
And I thought: You’ve got a pretty good shot at that.
A handful of us were talking about debt, and getting out of it.
The first—the absolutely necessary—step in doing that is to stop incurring any new debt. Unsecured debt. (I draw a distinction between secured and unsecured debt.) You can get into trouble with the former, but it’s the latter that will really demolish your life.
Anyway, this woman—who was a jewelry designer with a co-op on the Upper East Side of New York (that’s generally big money up there), and a pretty glamorous piece of work herself—owed a couple of tens of thousands at that point, not devastating for her, but an amount that had been rising steadily. But there were just some things she wasn’t going to cut down on. Just wasn’t.
I saw her again about five years later. She was haggard, fraught, had sold or pawned much of what she had once owed, was being threatened with foreclosure on her co-op. What she was doing that afternoon was running around the city buying lottery tickets at locations she had divined through some esoteric kind of feng shui or geomancy that had the best chance of producing a winning ticket.
She had to win, she told me. It was the only hope she had left. And then she was off, hurrying to the subway on her way down to Chinatown where she was going to buy her next five dollars worth of tickets.
I don’t know what happened to her. I never saw her again.
I don’t think it was anything good.
“Ask for Enough . . .”
Last night I went over to the “Partners & Crime” bookstore here in Greenwich Village to hear my friend Lawrence Block, the multiply-honored mystery and crime novelist, read from his new novel—A Drop of the Hard Stuff–and then take questions from the fans who had come to hear him.
It’s what you do for friends now and then (not that Larry needs that kind of support), and I hadn’t done it for awhile, and he couldn’t have made it easier, appearing in a venue that was only a five-minute walk away for me on a pleasant summer night.
So here he is last night reading:
What he read was a good, tight, short setup for the story, with some humor, some foreboding, and fast engagement with the principle characters. The audience loved it.
And then in the Q&A that followed Larry showed himself once again to be not only the fine writer he is but also the fine raconteur and entertainer he is too.
An answer he gave someone toward the end of the evening got me to thinking about something he’d said to me many years ago—20 and maybe even 25 now. It was one of the most useful things I’ve ever heard about money. I was earnestly going over with him and asking his counsel on setting a price for some undertaking which I don’t even remember now: either a new book I was writing, a speaking engagement, or an editing or ghostwriting job.
He nodded as he listened. And then he said to me:
“Well, what you want to do is set a price high enough so that if they accept it, you won’t end up resenting having to do the work.”
A casual—and to him, organic—piece of wisdom that has served me well for about a quarter of a century.
(When I’ve remembered it.)
What brought the memory back was when someone toward the close of the event last night asked Larry how he had ended up writing an Introduction for a DC Comics graphic novel a number of years ago, which isn’t the kind of thing he usually does.
Larry paused a moment, looking up and off to the side, apparently trying to remember this. Then looked back down and smiled.
“They offered me money,” he said brightly.
And without a hint of resentment.
