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Letting Go of "Honesty" (an excerpt)
Hugh Prather

Steps toward Inner Peace
Peace Pilgrim

Your Worst Financial Enemy (part two)
Thomas Schweich

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Life is short and we never have enough time for gladdening the hearts of those who travel the way with us.  O, be swift to love!  Make haste to be kind.

Henri Frédéric Amiel

Pamela J. DeRoy

All of us know people we find "hard to take," who "push our buttons," whom we "just can't stand."  Those who evoke within us a strong reaction represent something about ourselves that we have not made fully conscious.  It's actually kind of helpful to have these people around to remind us that there is still work to be done.  I'm sure you don't believe that, and I don't either, but it's true.

Obviously it's not helpful to have individuals around who are a threat to us or our loved ones.  No one should endure danger.  Nor does it accomplish anything useful to force ourselves to relate to someone who is so disturbing to our family, our business, or ourselves that we can't concentrate.  I hope it's also clear that in mentioning people we find difficult, I'm not speaking of the insight we possess that allows us to see dishonest people as dishonest, conceited people as conceited, or cruel people as cruel.  Not every bully is a projection.

I am speaking just of individuals who irritate us personally, who "set us off," who "drive us up the wall."  Projection is found in our reaction, which is added to insight.  We can perceive that an individual "has a mean streak" without adding condemnation.  But if we think, feel, and speak condemnation, we can be certain that we are projecting.  The condemnation can feel quite honest, yet this is just one example of the kind of honesty we can do without.

A simple illustration of this type of unconscious projection is a little boy who spanks his stuffed animals because he himself is spanked.  He lectures his elephant, tells it it has been bad, tells it that what he has to do will hurt him more than the elephant.  Then he spanks it and says, "No!  No!  No!  No!"  At that moment, the boy has no doubt that the elephant is bad.  In reality, he unconsciously believes that he is bad.

Other illustrations are a person who brags, but criticizes people who "strut."  Or an employee who cheats the company, yet berates those who "don't deserve" the welfare or disability they collect.

Once we uncover the part of ourselves that these individuals are a version of, we do not then reject it.  We accept it.  We accept that it is an undeniable aspect of our personal ego.

Acceptance in this context means that we admit that we are the way we are.  Having done that, now we are in a position to choose not to extend that part of us--but, instead, to extend a deeper, freer, more loving part.  Nevertheless, we can't extend what is good about us until we see what we are substituting.

A strong judgmental feeling about someone--especially someone in our life, rather than someone in the news--indicates simple failure to take responsibility for an aspect of our ego.  This aspect cannot be guessed or arrived at through reasoning.  That won't work.  It must be recognized.  Yet most people avoid taking responsibility by making this very mistake.  For instance, they come up with some remarkable and virtuous-sounding theory about why this person irks them.  ("She's pretentious and I've never liked pretension"; "He reminds me of my dad, who was nothing but a sweet-talking con man"; "She's truly dangerous to do business with because she acts like a nice person.")  As a result, nothing changes.

You will know that you have clearly seen what you were not admitting about yourself when the people who irritate you no longer do--even though they are behaving as usual.  You accepted it in yourself, and you accept it in them.  In fact, you will feel something akin to affection for them because they have had to deal with the same problem you have.
  

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I’ve noticed that people with big debt loads and big houses are often hiding a lot of internal worry and strife in their marriage because of the burden of taking care of a big house and making those big payments.  They might have a Christmas party and show off their home to you and show off how “well they’re doing,” but inside, if they have a heavy debt load and they really have more house than they can truly afford, I’ve found emotional illness and high divorce rates lurking there.  I’ve seen it happen again and again.  People who have too much house have a lot of problems.  They’re inviting problems to occur, both problems with the physical aspects of their house, with wasted space, and problems in their marital relationships and in their family relationships.

One gust of financial trouble and these people are on the ground.  It’s not a pyramid at all when you have too much house.  It’s basically trying to balance on the top of a flagpole, and I don’t recommend it.  So determine how much home you really need before you buy.  Success is not measured by how much debt someone is willing to amass.

All right, there are other things you can do to keep your expenditures to within 70% of your after-tax income.  Let’s talk next about basic necessities--food and clothes and things like that.  It’s very simple to save money on these kinds of items.  Malls--expensive, glitzy malls--are structures designed to separate you from your wealth.  The mall’s structure is designed to break down your pyramid structure.  You want to shop at the fancy places with all the marble and fountains everywhere, but they can charge you more money for the pleasure of shopping at somewhere that’s so pleasing to the eye. 

There is a nice alternative.  The fact of the matter is, you can go to the outlet malls, the discount stores, where they sell the same name brands that have been closed out or discarded by major companies, and you can find tremendous values there.  You can find very expensive, high-quality suits, for example, if you’re a man, at these places.  I shop at these places, and I get the same suit as at the expensive place at half the price.  And I can tell you, you can save hundreds and hundreds of dollars on clothes if you avoid the glitz and go somewhere a little more austere.  Don’t be embarrassed about it at all.  It’s very, very important to do those kinds of things, especially during the kind of times we’re in now.

Food purchasing.  There’s a study that some people did recently in which they took 30 items that people most commonly buy and priced them out. They went to one store and priced them out, and it was $178.  Then they went to another store less than a mile away, priced the same items out, and it was $113.  Now, if you take that difference between $113 and $178 and you price that out over 20 years, and that’s $60,000, if you invested that money safely during the course of the process of buying the food.

So the fact of the matter is, by finding the cheapest place to buy food, you can save tremendous amounts of money.  All grocery stores are not equal.  There are some that simply charge a lot more than others.  And you have to be very careful.  And do one of these pricing tests yourself.  One Saturday, just go out and buy 10 of your favorite items at one store and then go to another store and see what the same 10 would have cost you, and you’d be amazed at the price differential.  And continue to do that from time to time, update your shopping activities, and again, you can find amazing savings.

And there have been some stunning studies on how much money you can save by just not going to the nearest place or the place you’re used to going to or the place your parents or friends go to.  Shop around for shopping.  And again, you can find a way to stay within that 70% limit that we’re trying to achieve in terms of your day-to-day expenses, 70% of your income.

The last issue about buying food is volume purchasing.  There have been some interesting studies on volume purchasing.  People think if you buy the really big roll of toilet paper or the really big box of cereal, you’re saving money.  The fact of the matter is, in a vast majority of the cases, you’re not.  Shelf space is very hard to come by in a store, and lack of mobility in shelf space is a very major factor in pricing.  Very big items take up a lot of shelf space, and they don’t give you a lot of leeway if you’re the store owner.  A lot of times stores will charge more proportionately for the large items than they will for a medium or smaller item.  So don’t assume that just because you’re buying a really big item that you’re getting the best price.  The fact of the matter is you have to check the price per unit, the price per ounce, or the price based on some measurable quantity to see if you’re really getting the best price.

So when it comes to basic necessities, if you stay away from the glitz, if you shop around, use outlet stores and warehouse stores, make sure you realize that food is not the same price at every place, you can save a lot of money. Shop even more carefully for generics because the price disparities are even greater among them than among name-brand items.  And volume purchasing can be valuable, but it isn’t always, so make sure you’re doing a very careful comparison of the unit cost.

Okay, the next item in trying to keep your living expenses, your limited-purpose checking funds, to 70% of your income, is to reduce the number of utility and technology players in your life.  Let me ask you a very simple question:

Do you really need all that stuff?  I mean, I know people who have two or three phone lines at home, they have office and voicemail.  They have office voicemail, they have home voicemail, they’ve got three cell phones, they’ve got a Palm Pilot, a BlackBerry, two Internet accounts, three email accounts, three VCRs, a DVD player, a stereo system with a 20-disc CD changer, premium cable, a pager, DSL, a website.  I mean, these people can spend $400 or $500 a month on technology.  Have you ever thought about maybe reading a book?  I mean, how much do people use all these things?  So many people spend money on utilities that they do not use or that they do not really need.

As I love to say, success is not measured by how many times you can be interrupted or how many times people can get hold of you on your various means to be communicated with, or how many emails you have to monitor every day.  The fact of the matter is we can all probably do a little better with a little less in the way of technology and a little more in the way of quality time with our families.

Again, living with 70% of your income for your day-to-day expenses is not that difficult if you just say, Wait a minute, do I really need all this stuff?  Can my lifestyle be just as good without all this stuff?  And then cut back a little bit.

And the last thing you use your limited-purpose checking account money for is routine recreation.  And when I say routine recreation, that should be kept to about 5% of the 70% that you’re using for your day-to-day activities.  And that would go for movies and things like that, modest entertainment.  The more extravagant things are for the slush fund that I’ll address later.

For a family making, for example, $80,000 or $85,000 a year, when you do the math, that turns out to $300 or $400 a month in routine entertainment expenses that you can have and do.  So it’s really not that difficult; it’s not being austere; it’s not cutting way back on your lifestyle to try to limit your expenditures in that way.  I don’t think it’s that hard to do.  I do it.  I know a lot of people who do it.  If you’re just a little more careful about what you buy and how you buy it, it’s a very feasible goal for all of us.

Now that leads us to the next corner of the pyramid, and that’s the slush fund. What about bigger expenditures, luxury items, vacations, things like that?  I found that if you can learn to live on about 10% of your after-tax income in the slush fund, you will find that you do very, very well. You can have a very exciting life and still have enough money left over to invest, which I address more in my Protect Your Wealth program.

Now, I don’t want to die rich and miserable.  I don’t want to be a cheap person.  I’ve read a couple of these books that say the only way to be successful financially is never to spend any money on anything, and I just don’t agree with that.  I think if you have enough structure in your life to define how you’re going to spend your money, you can have a section of that money, a portion of that money, for really fun things.  And that’s what this slush fund is all about.  You put about 10% of your money in a separate account so that you have this area very carefully segregated in your mind and also physically segregated.  And you say 10% of my after-tax income is for pure fun.

My slush fund has two real purposes.  The first purpose is to eliminate the really serious problems you have with your finances.  The second purpose then is to have a lot of fun.  So I’m going to talk first about how you can use slush-fund money to get rid of the big holes in your financial structure and then how much fun you can have with it once you’re done getting rid of the big holes.

Use slush-fund money to help yourself stop traditional vices.  Now, look, I am not preaching morality here; I don’t purport to tell people how to live their life, what they should do or should not do.  I’m going to talk about this purely in terms of money.

Let me give you an example.  People who start smoking at age 17 and who smoke two packs a day until they’re age 65, if they make it that far, if they invested that money, the same amount of money they’re spending on cigarettes today, very conservatively, like treasury bonds or modest, simple, reliable stocks, they will have more than $1 million at age 65.  If they don’t, they literally smoked all that money away.  If you throw in the typical amount that an American would drink and gamble and just cut that amount in half — I’m not even telling you to stop drinking and stop gambling, just cut that amount in half and stop smoking, you’d have more than $2 million.  There’s math in Protect Your Wealth to prove it to you.  It’s a very simple fact that if you smoke and drink and gamble, as fun as that might be, you’re probably throwing away $2 million worth of retirement income.

Now I’m not even getting into the medical aspects in any of this.  All I’m saying is that there is one way you can plug a major, major spending risk, and I always encourage people to use that slush-fund money to pay for whatever they need to stop or cut back on their vice, especially if it gets to the point of an addiction.  Because addiction is not only costing you money, it becomes a real downward spiral.  It hurts even worse because it affects your ability to make money if you have an alcohol problem, a drug problem, or a gambling problem. It will affect you on the job, it will affect your family,  and it’s not only a cost to you in terms of your future retirement income, but it can really send you on a complete downward financial spiral and destroy everything you’ve been working for.  So use your slush-fund money to seek any professional help you need to eliminate the really serious spending vices, if at all possible.

The next area which you need to get rid of, to get cash into the slush fund, is high-interest debt.  The typical American family now has roughly $8,000 in credit card debt.  If you pay the minimum on that, you wind up paying $25,000 to $40,000 to pay that money off.  It’s just a bleeding financial wound, and it has to become a priority of yours to pay down your debt before you start having a lot of fun.

And the people who are experts in debt reduction have basically six simple principles of debt reduction.  Again, I detail these in Protect Your Wealth.  

A word of warning, however, when it comes to one of the points on debt reduction, and that’s with some of the consumer credit counseling agencies. There have been some pretty big scandals in this industry.  You have to research these agencies as carefully as you research your business partners and your trading partners and anybody else.  There are a lot of fly-by-night operations, even non-profit fly-by-night operations, that say, “Well, we don’t charge a fee, but we ask for a gift to help support our organization.”  So you go in there and you want to get some help with $20,000 or $30,000 of debt, and they’re demanding a $2,000 gift so they can say they don’t charge any fees.  And then they won’t help you unless you give them the gift.  There have been a lot of scams and frauds like that.

Read Part Three next week!

In this revolutionary new program, acclaimed author, lawyer, and speaker Thomas Schweich will walk you through every professional, financial, and personal challenge that you could possibly face. From the dangers of poorly worded e-mails to the loopholes in insurance policies, Mr. Schweich will not only warn you of curve balls that life might throw your way, but he will also provide you with the tools you can implement to avoid all of the major risks to your life.

Your Hidden Potential
Ari Kiev

Your life has been designed to work, and your hidden potential contains what you seek and all that you need in life.  It is OK to be who you are and choose what you have.  The Quakers call it the "still, small voice within," that place of full awareness within that is in touch with the entire universe and is the source of wisdom.  In effect, you don't have to keep searching for confirmation by focusing on being someone else or being somewhere else.  There is no place else to be and nothing else to get.  You will be able to grasp the levels of change in your life when you can allow yourself to be present in the moment, accept the world as it is, and trust that everything is as it was intended to be.  Thomas Merton put it succinctly:  "We have what we seek.  It is there all the time, and if we give it time it will make itself known to us."  Putting it another way, the Zen writer Senrin wrote:  "If you do not get it from yourself, where will you go for it?"

What leads to this misplaced effort, to this lack of meaningful direction?  Many difficulties result from faulty self-images learned in your earliest years.  Much of your personality and your concept of yourself comes from the emphasis on some and the neglect of other features of your personality during your childhood.  If this emphasis matched your temperament, talents, and special skills, you have developed an accurate and realistic self-image.  If not, you have probably experienced much conflict.  You may, for example, have an inclination to paint but were conditioned to reject it.  The more you become aware of these suppressed sides of yourself, the more you will be able to accept and utilize your hidden potential.  While your choices as a child may have been limited, they need no longer be limited.  You decide what to do with your life.  In the last analysis, your behavior, not chance or the concepts of others, determines your concept of yourself and whether or not you will reach the goals you set.