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Published: March 08, 2006 Ten Ways to Make the Most of Your Money and Your Life
Worried about Coming Bills, Your Investments, and Balancing Work with the Rest of Your Life?
Award-winning, best-selling author Eric Tyson tells you how in his new book, Mind over Money: Your Path to Wealth and Happiness.
New York, NY - We Americans are a financially anxious lot. While much of that anxiety comes from living paycheck to paycheck, which the vast majority of Americans do, we're also anxious about our investments, balancing work and family, etc. Money is the number-one issue couples fight about, and spending is the number-one thing we hide from our spouses. (The number-one issue married couples cover up is how much they spend according to Ipsos-NPD! Husbands hide details on their purchases from their wives about as often as the women dupe the men in their lives.)
Enter Eric Tyson, whose smash best-seller Personal Finance for Dummies won the Benjamin Franklin award for Best Business Book of the Year. His new book is Mind over Money: Your Path to Wealth and Happiness (CDS Books, 2006, ISBN: 1593152388), which explains that much of this anxiety can be addressed through spending some productive energy thinking about and talking about money.
So if you're anxious about your spending, your investments, and balancing work with the rest of your life, what can you do to develop better spending, investing, and other financial habits to make the most of your money and your life? Tyson offers the following tips for developing the best money habits:
Don't think that a budget is the best way to save more. Telling people to reduce their spending is like telling an overweight person to just lose weight. Easier said than done. "The fundamental problem is that following a budget or a diet is simply unpleasant and often doesn't attack the root causes (what you choose to read, watch, and emulate) of the problem," writes Tyson. "That's why I don't think budgets are the solution for most people."
Do track your spending. Get out your checkbook register, credit card statements, and anything else that will help you detail where you spend your money in a typical month. Track these cash purchases for a week or two in a small notebook that you carry with you. Determining where your money has been going should help you to identify some fat to cut. "This approach works because you're not planning all of your spending in advance-which is a near impossible and utterly joyless task," writes Tyson. "What you are doing is examining your general spending and then making focused and targeted cuts."
Replace your credit cards with debit cards. "If you've had a tendency to carry debt balances month-to-month on credit cards, cut those up and instead get a VISA or MasterCard debit card, which are accepted by all merchants who take credit cards," says Tyson. "The difference is that a debit card is connected to your checking account, which prevents you from spending money that you don't have and carrying costly debt balances month-to-month."
Change the way you approach purchases. To change your consumption habits, you must first change your mindset about shopping. Typically this involves changing shopping from a source of entertainment, a distraction from other problems, and/or an impulse decision to a simple means to an end-acquiring a product that you feel you need and want. "To get a better handle on how you should make consumption decisions, observe friends and relatives who are thrifty and try learning some of their better spending habits," Tyson writes. "Don't shop with people who share your spending problems or who've often accompanied you on shopping sprees in the past."
First pay off consumer debt-then start saving. Don't begin a saving program until you've paid off your consumer debt. You're very unlikely to earn an investment return, after taxes, that exceeds the relatively high interest costs on credit cards and other common consumer debt. "When you can afford to set some money aside in savings, make your saving automatic by setting up a direct-deposit payroll deduction with your employer (or using automatic checking account transfers to an investment account if you're self-employed)," he writes. "That way, you're free to spend what's leftover, and you don't need to drive yourself and other family members crazy tracking every expenditure."
Consider your investment "wants." Investing is clearly more complicated than just setting your goals (when do you want to retire, how much of your kids' college costs do you desire to pay, and so on) and choosing solid investments. You should also consider what you want and don't want to get from the process of investing. Is it a hobby or simply another of life's tasks, such as maintaining your home? Do you desire the intellectual challenge of picking your own stocks or would you be content with entrusting some of those decisions to others? Deciding how you feel about these considerations will shape your approach to managing your investments. Don't just ponder these questions on your own. Discuss them with family members, too-after all, you're all going to have to live with the investment decisions and results.
Learn how to cope with inevitable investment setbacks. Slow down and pull back from stressful situations and news before making future decisions. As with everything in life, recognize what you can and cannot control. Don't waste your time or energy by closely following things that you have no control over. Tyson is a big fan of the Serenity Prayer. It might help you to post this someplace where you'll see it daily, especially if you try to exert too much control over every little aspect of your investment portfolio, or your life in general. (Grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.)
Shun gurus who encourage problematic investment behaviors and beliefs. Many publications and programs offer some good information and advice. Problem is that some of the talking heads will lead you to take the wrong path. Especially prevalent online and on cable are pundits who advocate individual stock picking coupled with rapidly changing opinions. "Former hedge fund manager Jim Cramer, who is a self-acknowledged workaholic and frenetic trader, is a good example of someone you should not listen to and follow. You can't possibly keep up with the never-ending changes in his recommendations and the fact of the matter is that there's no documented proof that his investment picks have actually beaten the broad market averages over the long run."
Don't practice financial envy. Our culture too often focuses on getting ahead, promotions, and pay raises. But if you're going to make time for the important things in life, you must resist the temptation to be envious of those with loftier titles and salaries at your place of business and in your field. You can begin that process by realizing that there are no free lunches. Although some people are blessed with extraordinary talent and luck, you'll often find that the super-successful people in this world, with their mugs on the cover of every magazine, are workaholics. Don't emulate these workaholics to get "ahead."
Choose employers and careers considering the big picture. "Over the years, I've seen many people with modest incomes make the decision to fit work into their lives rather than continuing to try to fit their lives into their work. So often, though, people twist and contort their lives and priorities to meet the perceived expectations and demands of their bosses and employers," says Tyson. Fitting work into the rest of your life often involves choosing employers and even careers that enable you the flexibility and ability to accomplish your personal and family goals.
"With a deliberate, conscious effort you can overcome your overspending and poor investment habits and better balance your life's demands," says Tyson. "And the payoff is huge. Not only will you reap long-term financial benefits, you'll gain peace of mind and the satisfaction that comes from mastering money. And that's something you can't buy in any store."
Eric Tyson is one of the nation's best-selling personal finance book authors and has penned five national best sellers (he is also the only author to have four of his books simultaneously on Business Week's business book best-seller list). His Personal Finance for Dummies (Wiley) won the Benjamin Franklin Award for the Best Business Book of the Year. He is also the author of Investing for Dummies and co-author of Home Buying for Dummies and Real Estate Investing for Dummies, among other titles.
Eric is a former columnist and award-winning journalist for the San Francisco Examiner. His work has been featured and quoted in hundreds of local and national publications and media outlets including Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, Kiplinger's Personal Finance, Money, Worth, Parenting, and USA Today, as well as on NBC's Today Show, ABC, CNBC, PBS's Nightly Business Report, CNN, CBS national radio, NPR's MarketPlace Money, and Bloomberg Business Radio. He was also a featured speaker at a White House conference on retirement planning.
Tired of working as a management consultant to Fortune 500 financial services firms that were more interested in maximizing short-term profits than in providing sound financial products and services, Eric founded, in 1990, the nation's first financial counseling firm that works exclusively on an hourly basis. He started his new company with a simple mission: to provide objective, cost-effective, personal finance advice, especially to nonwealthy Americans. Through family and friends, Eric had seen many intelligent people make horrendous mistakes in managing their money.
In addition to his writing and counseling, Eric also taught the nation's most highly attended personal financial management course at the University of California, Berkeley. A dynamic and provocative speaker, he has spoken at many corporations and nonprofits.
His educational background includes a bachelor's degree in economics from Yale and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Mind over Money (CDS Books, 2006, ISBN: 1593152388) is available at bookstores nationwide and all major online booksellers.
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