MONEY ROADMAP

    Our personal relationship with money encompasses our earning, spending, debts, and savings, and how much time they occupy in our lives. Our relationship with money also shows us how much personal satisfaction and fulfillment we get from our family, community, and the planet Earth. Once we change our relationship with money, by means of a 9 step plan, we can achieve a new and improved level of consciousness, health, comfort, and competence about money, about our lives, and about the planet Earth.

     Let's begin by looking at the difference between the old roadmap and new roadmap about money. The old roadmap trapped us in the very place it was supposed to liberate us from. Examples of the old roadmap include: 9 to five till we’re 65, owe your soul to the company store, and striving forever for a higher standard of living regardless of personal, social, spiritual, and world consequences. For many decades, the old roadmap delivered the goods, but only so long as we needed and wanted more material possessions. While at work, people identified with their jobs. While not at work, people became consumers who purchased material possessions. The word “consume” means to “destroy, squander, use up.” People considered shopping a recreational sport. They “shop till they drop.”     

     People also wanted a better future for their children, so they worked even harder, and often became a two income family where nannies or daycare centers replaced home parenting. People bought their children the newest toys and luxuries, because they felt guilty about abandoning their children all day long, and because they wanted to prove their love for them.

     People began spending so much time earning money to buy material possessions for themselves and their families that they no longer took time to examine their personal, social, spiritual, and world priorities. In the end, instead of making people more healthy, happy, and independent, the old roadmap made them more financially dependent. From birth to death, people had become financially dependent. First, people became dependent upon their parents for financial security; then upon the business economy to get them a good job; then upon their jobs for financial survival, and possibly upon state and federal unemployment handouts to sustain them between jobs; and finally upon their retirement pension and 401K plans and Medicare benefits before they died. In a nutshell, the material progress that was supposed to free people only enslaved them.

     A tipping point eventually occurred at the height of the old roadmap way of living. Personal conditions dramatically changed. For many affluent people, material possessions went from fulfilling their life needs, to enhancing comfort, to facilitating luxury, and then beyond luxury to outright excess: $2,500 purses, $1,500 business suits, $500 blouses and shirts and shoes, heated bathroom floors and toilets, granite kitchen counter tops, stainless steel kitchen appliances, Viking kitchen stoves, French hardwood floors, Egyptian 1500 thread count bed sheets, silk pillowcases, $100,000 German driving machines, and 10,000 square foot homes with two or three air conditioning and heating units and elevators.

   At the same time, adverse global issues emerged that could not be solved by simply providing more material goods. The entire planet Earth showed signs of nearing its capacity to handle the economic growth and consumerism: air pollution, water shortages, global warming, ozone holes, natural resource degradation and depletion, rainforest eradication, trash buildup, strip mining, cracking, and species extinction.

    All of these personal and global issues questioned our very survival on Earth. But, according to the book, there is still hope for us. The old roadmap can be replaced by a new roadmap. “Your Money or Your life” shows us how to create this new roadmap. The book recommends a 9 step plan that will ensure our global survival, as well as our personal health, happiness, prosperity, and peace of mind. Here is the plan: 

    Step 1: Make Peace with your Past. Add up all the money you’ve earned in your entire life, and then calculate how much money and assets you have today. Look closely at how much money you held onto, and how much money you spent. For most people, this calculation yields a very unpleasant surprise. But that’s alright. There’s no sense beating our self up over past mistakes.

    Step 2:  Figure out your Real Earnings and Spending. Add up your monthly income after federal and state taxes, and then subtract all your monthly work related expenses, such as purchasing special clothes and dry cleaning costs, automobile service and repairs and insurance and gasoline and parking costs, lunches, housekeepers, daycare, and medications and other medical charges due to work stress and illnesses given to us by other employees. After you subtract your work related expenses from your total income, take this number and divide it by your total monthly work time which includes dressing, commuting, clothes cleaning, work time, and unwinding time after work. This calculation will show how you take home much less money than you believed, and spend much more time earning it than you imagined. This calculation can easily demonstrate how a $50 per hour wage is really an $8 per hour wage after work related expenses are subtracted from your hourly pay wage. The key to this calculation, what it really wants to teach us, is to find new ways to lower our work related expenses, such as by avoiding expensive cars that we use mostly to commute to and from work, avoiding designer clothes that we only wear at work, and impulse shopping. Instead, we learn to buy economical cars and classic clothes that require no dry cleaning and which remain stylish, and find free methods, such as deep breathing, meditation, and yoga, to reduce our stress.

     Step 3: Create Monthly Reports. Keep track of all your income and spending each month. Break this income and spending down into categories, and then convert the monetary amounts into your real hourly pay, or as the book calls it, “hours of life energy spent.”

   Step 4: Ask yourselves three questions. For each of the categories listed above, ask yourself, Did I receive personal fulfillment in proportion to the hours of life energy I expended? Is this expenditure in alignment with my personal health, happiness, and ultimate life purpose? How might this expenditure change if I didn’t have to work for a living? In other words, would this expenditure be more, less, or the same if I stopped working at my job?

   Step 5: Maintain a written graph of income and expenses. Keep your monthly graft available for personal viewing. Maintain this graft for months, and then years. Most people will begin seeing their real hourly wage start to rise, and their expenses begin to fall, because they become conscious of, and change, their spending habits. 

     Step 6: Learn to Value your Life Energy by Minimizing Spending. Determine if you’re spending money on a need, want, luxury, or excess. Also, determine what level of spending you want to stop at, such as need, want, or luxury. Most people learn how to spend their money more efficiently on the things that give them true happiness and fulfillment.

     Step 7: Maximize your Earnings. Adopt and maintain a positive attitude about money. Accept 100% responsibility for your life and work. Whenever possible, maximum your earnings by multiple streams of income, and by portfolio and passive income.

     Step 8: Watch for the Crossover Point. The crossover point is when your monthly and annual portfolio and passive income from your investments, such as stocks, bonds, real estate, copyrights, etc., equals or exceeds your monthly or annual expenses. When you achieve this crossover point, you have become financially independent.

   Step 9: Safely Manage your Money. Become knowledgeable about financial strategies and vehicles for your portfolio and passive income, and invest such income safely and wisely in those financial vehicles. Make certain when you reach the crossover point, and achieve financial independence, that your financial vehicles at least provide your basic needs for the remainder of your life.