Thesis: Learn to manage your money because it has a huge impact on your quality of life.
Stuff to Remember:
- Make peace with the past
- Determine how much you have made in your life.
- Check with social security
- Copies of tax returns
- Paycheck stubs; employers’ records
- Why? Give a clear picture of how powerful you are in bringing money into your life. Eliminates vagueness or self-delusion. Instills confidence.
- What have you got to show for it? Find out your net worth.
- List and give a current market value to everything you own.
- List everything you owe.
- Deduct liabilities from assets.
- Why: you don’t know what enough is unless you know what you have.
- Track your life energy
- How much are you trading your life energy for?
- Deduct from your gross weekly income the costs of commuting and job costuming; the extra cost of at-work meals; amounts spent for decompressing, recreating, escaping and vacating from work stress; job-related illness; and all other expenses associated with maintaining you on the job.
- Add to your work week the hours spent in preparing yourself for wor, commuting, decompressing, recreating, escaping, vacating, shopping to make you feel better since your job feels lousy.
- Divide the new, reduced weekly dollar figure by the new increased wage – this is your real takehome.
- Why: This should motivate you one way or the other – is it worth it?
- Keep track of every cent that comes into or goes out of your life.
- Devise a record-keeping system that works.
- Why: You are in the business of trading the most precious resource in existence – your life energy. This shows what you’re trading it for.
- Where Is It All Going?
- Every month create a table of income and expenditures in categories.
- Balance your monthly income and outgo totals
- Convert dollars spent to hours of life energy in each category.
- How – just do basic math
- Why: this is a foundation to work on money tracking
- Ask three questions
- Did I receive fulfillment, satisfaction, and value in proportion to life energy spent?
- Is this expenditure of life energy in alignment with my values and life purposes?
- How might the expenditure change if I didn’t have to work for a living?
- Make Life Energy Visible
- Plot your income and expenses on a wall chart and look at it every day
- Value your life energy – minimize spending
- Maximize income
- Determine “enough”
- Capital income x current long term interest rate/12 months =monthly investment income