I wish I had a magic idea that would clear up the money dilemma, but I do not. All I can suggest is each side of a money debate work towards moving more towards the center line for the sake of both parties. The spender needs to adjust to the idea, that having money in the checking account on payday is okay. It is even better if it is moved to savings, but that is another step. For the frugal one, spending a little more saving a little less will not generally lead to financial catastrophe.

What I can suggest and perhaps it is a new thought for you if you are struggling with your finances, whether your own money, or the family money pool, is to look at what can be done differently. Being willing to look at finances from a different perspective may provide that needed nudge to the center of the spending chart where you are living within your means, but still having fun with your life.

I focus on three different areas of my life that need to be taken care of financially. Finding a proper balance between these three areas does not mean that life suddenly is wonderful and there is money to throw around, but life is easier. Finding a proper balance means that life may not be a spending spree, not having to work forever is somewhere down the road.

First and foremost, I believe the most important financial focus is your retirement age. Determine while you are young at what age do you want to retire at. Be an optimist, but also take into consideration your schooling and your ability to generate money. If you have no education and few prospects, retiring at forty is probably not going to happen. If you have won a mega lottery, you can do whatever you wish within reason.

Secondly, you have to decide on your life style. Determine what type of lifestyle you can be happy with. Some people are happy with very little and some people want it all. All of us find ourselves somewhere in between. No one can have it all, and no one reading this is in much danger of finding themselves with nothing, and no possibility of improving.

Finally, but not least, a decision needs to be made on what you are willing to accept in the way of food and shelter. While most financial advice puts food and shelter as a higher priority, it does not need to be. When one is sleeping, there is little difference between a thousand dollar mattress, and a pile of blankets, as long as you sleep well it does not matter. The same goes for food. You may wish to eat steak and lobster three meals a week, but oatmeal and beans serve the body as well if not better than more expensive eating may.

The reason I choose retirement as the first option is not obvious if you are young and starting out on your life. If you are like most people starting out in life, you do not want to work, but you need to make a living until you can retire. The age you can retire at if you can afford to retire at all in many cases is determined by how you spend your lifetime earning between now and the day you set for retirement.

Having a nice place to live, flashy cars, and spending money on wants instead of needs is fun, it definitely effects your retirement age. If you choose to retire at fifty, and you have an average job, buying a flashy new car and making payments, does not build up the money you need to be able to experience life at fifty and retired. Walking, riding a bicycle, or taking a bus is more in line with making transportation as cheap as you can.

We should choose daily what we want for our life. We can live on the edge now, and risk everything for the moment, or choose to have less now to have more in the future. What is your retirement worth to you when you? What is your life style worth ? What is what you eat and where you live worth?

When poor, utilities and other items, such as the phone bill, and cable, are cut off from time to time. Checks are often floated and occasionally bounce, because in the the world of poor there is not enough money to go around each month. When there is money to turn something back on there is a ‘Poor tax’ to be paid as service or reconnection fees. These fees are pretty severe, further crippling the already short money supply. Paying a Poor Tax for one service usually means not paying another bill that is due risking having it shut off.

The world of Poor Tax and other ‘fees’, is a downward spiral where families and individuals realize they simply can not afford to live ‘normally’. There are two other sides to being poor not usually spoken of. People who are always short of money find ways to make their money stretch. Normally this compensated for in ways one may not be proud of.

Some money stretching activities seem harmless when you are poor, such as asking for a water cup at the local fast food, and filling the water cup with soda. Other ways involve buying stolen food, or stealing food yourself. Buying shoplifted or otherwise stolen personal items are typical of purchased stolen items. Buying stolen tires or a battery for the car you can not afford to insure happens too.

Secondly, an emotional Poor Tax is often paid. Being poor bestows on some poor people a difference that only they can see. Once they leave their house or neighborhood, they are out of their comfort zone. Out of their comfort zone feel quite self conscious, and feel less than. Of course they were not equal by their own standards to start with, but being out and about, feels more obvious. Poor people tend to think everyone knows they are poor, and not equal in the eyes of other’s eyes they glance into.

Lucky poor people, or those who have the opportunity to improve their life eventually arrive at a point where they are able to leave the poor life behind them. They worked hard and received an education, or otherwise struggled out from under the grinding wheel of being poor.

For some no longer poor people, poor thinking has never left due to a lifetime of feeling poor. They can not quit thinking about being less than. Thinking poor any time is a self limiting belief, but thinking poor when the situation no longer exists is worse.

Thinking poor shuts a lot of doors that are normally be opened in life. When opportunity doors open, a poor thinking person does not recognize them for what they are. For them, life opportunities never appear, or fall through. Finding a career instead of a job is very difficult, and feeling equal to others is difficult because deep down many people who once were poor do not feel as equal as those around them. Thinking poor is not limited to an economic state, some people in all walks of think poor.

To stop thinking poor change what you think. Thinking poor because you do not have en equal amount of money lends itself to having little respect for yourself, others, and money. This is wrong think, and low self esteem, along with poor money management skills. Low self esteem and poor money management skills mean – Thinking poor keeps you poor.

Stop struggling trying to meet some silly material standard. It may have already passed, or may never be met. Treat money with the respect and money will respect you back. Treat others with respect, and they will respect you more. Taking care of what you have and keeping your emotional self in a positive state, will bring treasure into your life because you will now be ready to accept them.

Almost every company I have worked for has had a special charity or organization that they support. Most of us have our own special charities that we support in some fashion. One I supported for a long time tried to help children with medical conditions that had no where else to turn to. Some people I knew referred to what they did as experimental surgery, but when all other avenues are exhausted, medical care from the edge becomes someone’s only possibility no matter how experimental it may be.

I would donate some money to this charity every year at tax refund time, or more often if I could afford it. One day my mind was wandering, and I was thinking about the money I gave to my special charity. I was feeling pretty good about it when the idea occurred to me that I was not even covering the cost of some doctor’s bathroom break at the hospital they worked at!

I knew that my thoughts were noble, but in reality, what I gave to that charity was so little, it probably barely paid for the paper it was tracked on. From there I went to donating money to a local church. That seemed pretty fitting. Give money to a church, and they distribute that money out to those in need.

I am in church one morning listening to the priest talk about going to a city one hundred miles away for some shopping, a steak dinner, and a movie. At this point in my life, I had maybe five dollars free for my whole weekend entertainment. I did some quick calculating in my head, and I determined that it would take a few months of my donations to pay for one trip such as the priest was talking about. I thought about the last of a four day old casserole I had eaten for dinner last night, and somehow my dinner and his did not balance out.

I was trying hard to make an impact, and do the right thing, but it was obvious I was not in even close to the middle of the income level of this church, and it was doubtful my few dollars a Sunday were doing anything for anyone really.

About this time, I started doing volunteer work, and that was gratifying at times. The only problem was it was hard to fit my free time into a groups need. So volunteering became sporadic at best. I found a homeless shelter that needed money and food, and that was pretty rewarding for a few years. I could see I was making a direct impact on peoples lives right where I live, and that made me happy.

A group of gay men and women who wanted to do something charitable for their community started doing car washes, bake sales, and other fund raisers to raise money. When they raised over ten-thousand dollars, they tried to give it away to the homeless shelter I was supporting with my few dollars every few weeks. A funny thing happened though, the founder of the shelter refused the money! He claimed that as a Christian he could not accept money from those people…. I wrote him and told him the money I gave him came from playing poker, and I won my money in part from drug dealers, gang bangers, pimps, and addicts. Certainly my money was no better than the money he refused. I ended making it clear, that my money would be going somewhere else. Thankfully, so did about half of the charitable donators also agree with me, and gave their money elsewhere.

Now I give to a charity that spends the money right where I live, helping people in my city and state, and I feel good about that. I know that my money is going to things I can see, appreciate, and hopefully those being helped do too. I do not my time often as I found in general, donating my time was more painful than it was rewarding which is too bad, I wish it were not so.

If you have little or no money and want to do something, look around your neighborhood. If you pay attention, you will find someone or some group needs your help. If you donate to a charity, make sure it is one that makes you feel good, not just a charity that makes feel like you are fulfilling an obligation.

The better poker players are chameleons. They will try to represent any type of personality necessary to help separate you from your money. They know why they are sitting there, poker is their livelihood and knowing that is part of what they need to maintain their lifestyle.

I had read an interesting book over a decade ago, by an author named Chin-Ning Chu. In her book, Ms. Chu makes an interesting case about an aspect of business that most of us never think about. Ms. Chu suggests that your business must rate at the top in your life. Once you understand this, and other concepts she suggests, you know what you need to do to excel in business.

Professional poker players understand this concept perfectly. If you sit down to play poker, it is their responsibility to do their best to take your money. Anything less than their best effort is a waste of their time, a flaw on their character, a threat to their livelihood, and an insult to you. Everything they do is focused on their ability to win money. That is the career they have chosen for themselves, and they do their utmost to be better at it than anyone else.

Thanks to Ms. Chu, I understood this idea when I started playing poker, I was not aware it applied to gambling. There was a poker game where a regular player was terminally ill. I came to learn that a few regular poker players at the poker room had wagers on when the man would die! I was appalled at the time to think that I was sitting down, next to people who would bet money on when a person would die from their illness.

A few weeks ago, Ms. Chu’s thinking made perfect sense to me, as this betting on death memory popped into my thoughts. In a flash I understood there was nothing appalling about those players! These were businessmen who correctly placed profit above everything else in their life. These people are a shining example of the American Dream for business! Admittedly, in many other cultures, particularly Ms. Chu’s, their action would not rate a second thought.

I have mentioned in a previous post that many business owners will not do whatever needs to be done to maximize profit. These players acting correctly as businessmen, attempted to maximize their profit. There is a lot to learn from this example, as distasteful as you may find it.

Like it or not, we are running our own business. When we are out in public, be it a social event, workplace, or somewhere else, we are selling ourselves, whether we are conscious of it or not. We belong in the business of self management in our daily lives.

People we come into contact with rate us, evaluate us, and put us on some scale of their own making. The question I have for both of us, is what do we do about it? We can’t ignore what is. We rate other people on our list, moving them up or down as we think they fit in our lives, and now we know they do too. Knowing this our options come down to one simple question. What are we willing to do to excel at our own lives and maximize ourselves?

As with all good sayings, there is more to this saying than the few words that is takes to write it. Each of us owns our own life, and we have the right to choose how we wish to live it. Where conflict comes in, eg, the horse not drinking, is when we care about someone. We care about someone, but their life choices, and our life choices are not the similar enough. Because we care about someone we have a tendency to jump in and try to correct situations when we are not invited to. We like to think that because we care about them, we are entitled to have an opinion or voice in any situation of theirs we disagree with.

Some people have to go through life facing difficulties. They need what a hard life brings to complete their goals in their life, whether spiritual, or character centered. Each problem facing them is a new opportunity to either grow into what they envision themselves to be, or to reaffirm what they believe they have become. Sort of like practicing for an event, it is hard for these people to practice without something wrong in their lives.

Unfortunately for some of us, there is nothing wrong in other peoples lives. Only what they have created or manifested is what is happening to them. To us they live at the edge of their economy, they hang out with the wrong people, they walk alone in the wrong places at the wrong time. They do a hundred things that they should not be doing – in our opinion. On a cold day, the heat is on and the door is left open, because the sun is shining and they are feeling closed in. Then next week an envelope arrives in the mail, and suddenly they can not afford their heating bill.

I believe generally it is wrong to help someone who continuously places themselves and/or their family in these types of situations. This thinking may sound cold hearted or just plain bad, but it is true. Whether the currency is money, time, or something else, our gifts are too valuable to waste on someone who does not value what we give. These gifts we have accumulated through our lives are not to be wasted. When gifts we have are given to someone who does not value them, what happens? To us it looks as if they have wasted their gifts, and now they are wasting our gifts too. Do not give away your gifts any quicker than you would give away your keys, and your home address. Your gifts are not necessarily overly scarce, but they are not endless either. They are to be used wisely and for the right reasons.

There is another old quote that applies in these situations, “Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.”

Helping others is a wonderful thing if it is done with the proper attitude, and the proper perspective. Throwing a dollar bill to the person that stands on the street corner with a pail every day is throwing away your financial gifts. Think of how much better use you can put your gifts to if they are given at the right time for the right reason to someone who is really ready for them? If you wait for the right time and the right reason to share your gifts, you will discover so much more than what you have given. The person you choose to share your gifts with will also receive so much more than a few dollars, or a little of your time. You will find you both have something to share in, and you both will feel fulfilled, and grateful, albeit for different reasons. Finally, in being frugal with sharing your gifts, you will find the greatest gift of all is letting someone make their own way, in their own fashion, at their own pace. Once you realize you have found this gift, you will know the people you were trying to help are perfect just the way they are! And they will know you finally understand what they have been trying so hard to teach you.

Technorati Tags: sharing, caring, family, charity, spirit

His involvement in his last and biggest pyramid scheme came under the scrutiny of the Attorney General of the state of Colorado. It is a good time to mention that he did not approach all these ventures all by himself. He always took someone with him. By the time he talked me into joining him at these money ,aking wonders he was near the end of his career. I went with him to listen to more than one or couple who drove up in a sixty foot RV talk about how they made it to that level, and how we could to, with just a little effort. My friend after listening to these ‘talks’ would be twisting and squirming in his chair like a man with pain where the chair meets the seat. He usually looked like he was ready to jump up and scream ‘Amen’ or something similar [I thought] at the end of these talks. We would always have about the same discussion driving home. What do you think?, he would say. I think it is a great program if you are willing to invest the time, I would reply. I think this is the one – like I never heard that one before. And so on and so forth until the next opportunity arrived.

After he explained this last one to me, he asked what I thought. It is a pyramid scheme I told him, this one is so obvious I can’t believe it is still going on! No it’s not, he said, it went to court in ‘some state’ and it was declared perfectly legal. But that is not this state, I replied. Doesn’t matter, if it is legal in that state, they will make it legal here too, was his response. He ever the money making optimist. Off he charged with this guaranteed program with fire in his eyes. He definitely was believer this time, he talked about ten people to jump right in with him. His own little empire in the making and he was at the top of it. He told me how the money would be rolling in. I mentioned to him about this getting attention in Colorado, and the Attorney General declaring it illegal. He laughed and said it would not happen here, I was not as up on the law as he was.

Just a few months later and he was scared, terrified actually. Arrest, and prosecution were a very possible future for him. He might be arrested any moment, and could be facing serious prison time for a variety of offenses the State had declared occurred. Several months passed, and for my friend it was a mixed bag. He managed to keep himself from being arrested and going to prison, but it was at a very high price. Remember at the beginning when I mentioned him losing his car and his family? He had put a lot of money into this deal, and what little he kept out, went as a down payment for his legal fees. On top of his car, and his family, went his job, and his self respect. For all his dreams, he went and joined the ranks of those that give up on life and started down the spiral path that is so hard to get out of.

I wish he would have been a little more cautious in his ventures. I said many times that any valid and legal business venture will make anyone wealthy if they are willing to put in the time. He never thought about working to make his dreams come true because he wanted it all right now.

I doubt he had taken the time to even see if his wife was okay with his plans for their ever bright future. He should have at least had her blessings in his ventures. I wish he would have actually put some real effort into his ventures. He went forth into these ventures with stars in his eyes, and in his haste he ended up on the dark side of the moon.