Reading the daily economic news can be absolutely frightening! Recently in Moneynews, there were five headlines, if taken at face value, that would terrify anyone who hopes for some degree of wealth and financial security:
CIA Adviser: “Economic Pearl Harbor” Could Strike America
Morici: Stagnant Productivity Weighs Against Fed Raising Rates
Economist Kotlikoff: “Our Country Is Broke”
Scientist Warns of 30-Year Freeze, Economic Disaster
New Warning – Stocks on the Verge of Major Collapse
To the extent these headlines have an impact on your personal sense of financial well being, the best solution is to sort out their impact on you and your family (along with concerns for tornados, earthquakes, random shootings, etc.). We can worry ourselves into bad health, or we can decide to do something more constructive.
Speaking financially, the best action to take is to identify the thing you can control. These are the only things you should be worrying about financially (or in any other area of your life). We do not control when the stock market crashes, but we do have influence over our own spending and debt so worrying about anything but our own area of influence is pointless.
I can control |
I can’t control |
| My spending | The Stock Market |
| My income | The weather |
| My health | Economic disasters |
| My relationships with family | Congress |
| My relationships with friends | The president of the U.S. |
| My debt | Politics |
| My retirement | Riots |
| My cash reserves | Radical Jihadism |
| My investment/strategies | Politicians |
| My taxes | Tax rates |
| My education | The IRS |
| My vacation | Corporate reduction of employees |
| My military service | Inflation |
| My vocation/job | Deflation |
| My bankruptcy choice |
We should not let the uncontrollable worldwide, national, and local events be any reason not to control every aspect of our personal financial happiness. I have found that most bad financial decisions can be attributed to circumstances that people find themselves in that they believe are not their fault (and therefore of which they have no control). Divorce is a good example of this. This is a very expensive consequence of decisions made with each party blaming the other. According to surveys of marriage counselors, 89 percent of all divorces are due to disagreements about money. After 21 years of coaching such divorced couples I have found that most marriages would not have dissolved had both partners been better informed. In other words, “what they didn’t know hurt them.” I have worked with so many people who have not learned, nor have been taught, that the financial gloom they are in is a result of choosing not to be in control financially, of blindly f
ollowing the bad advice they hear from the media, their neighbor, and even so-called money “experts.”
Not knowing financially what you need to know also comes from the fact that we live in a very complex financial world that our parents and grandparents did not have to deal with 60 or 70 years ago. We have so many more financial choices (as in easy available credit) and an overwhelming lack of skills to handle such choices. Long gone are the days when children ran around barefoot in the summertime because the available money had to be saved for school shoes in the fall. Now, parents just put the shoes on a credit card. You don’t see kids running around barefoot anymore but you can bet their parents are in a ton of debt because they don’t know how to control the complexity that comes into their life when they use “easy” credit to buy such simple things as school shoes.
Why do we have this lack of money management skill? It is because the world has passed us by. Its complexity is greater than what we have ever been taught in school, college, or by our parents. Oh, sure share ideas with us like, ”don’t eat out so much,” or “you just need to make more money,” or “save more.” These are worthy ideas but without a system for implementing them they don’t mean much. Personal financial management requires not only the nice ideas (or knowledge) but a way to put that knowledge to work (or in other words, a system). Without a proper system, making more money or even saving more money is not solving the problem…it’s just creating another one: inefficiency. In other words “more money” is a good idea (and there are many other good ideas) – it’s just not a solution to financial worry, fear, anxiety and lack of prosperity. It does not put you in control of one of the very few things for which you should be in control.
The solution to all the foregoing is to implement a systematic approach to controlling spending, debt, taxes and retirement. The Money Mastery Personal Financial System does just that. It is a superior, holistic, systematic approach. When followed, you will worry less about the financial “verge of collapse” factors around you that you can’t control, because you will be in control of your personal financial destiny. You will be able to do it your way, only better!
For more information contact Alan Williams at 801-292-1099, alan@moneymastery.com
