I’ve been working with the Seattle PowerGroup on Wealth Mastery. This is more than just coming up with money making ideas, it’s about changing the way you think and feel about money.
For me, I’ve lost a sense of what value money really has. I’ve always been fairly frugal, have never been in debt and having graduated with a degree in Finance, definitely know what value money has intellectually. The problem is, in the modern economy, I hardly ever touch or see medium or large amounts of money.
I pay for my lunch using a smartcard (at Microsoft). I shop in stores using a credit card. I pay for most of my bills electronically or using check. I buy things online using paypal. My paycheck is directly deposited to my bank account.
All of this means I rarely have more than a $50 in my wallet at any given time.
In the process, I seem to have lost touch with what value a dollar really has. When was the last time you held several hundred dollars in your hand? For me, it has been years.
Yesterday, I decided to close out a bank account at a local branch I was hardly ever using since I now do all my banking electronically. The balance was $207.11. I asked to withdraw the money as cash….all of it…..in $1 bills!
The teller was astonished, and proceeded to ask me if I really wanted to do that. She had to run the transaction as a couple batches, and asked if I was cool with the machine bill counting the money instead of her. I was.
She placed five large stacks on the counter. I asked for an envelope, but the largest one was still pretty small, so I asked for a paper bag. Filled with cash, I walked out of the bank followed by stares by the folks in line. They probably didn’t see that the bills were all $1’s and not $100’s.
Here is what the stash looks like:
This isn’t really that much money. At least not for me given my current salary. However, it did feel very strange to hold all that dough. It definitely felt like a lot of money. It definitely made me think about my rent and other expenses in a new light. It definitely gave me a new appreciation for my paycheck every other week.
But the exercise doesn’t stop with just holding it. I ran across a blog a few months ago (can’t remember where….if you find it, let me know and I will link to it here) about a technique for helping one to get disciplined about saving. So until my $207 runs out…..I am going to do the following:
Every day, I am going to put $1 in each of three stacks. One stack labeled FUN. One stack labeled GIVE. One stack labeled SAVE. It will look like so:
Once I run out of money, I will take the FUN stack and go do something totally ridiculous with it. Like buy a bunch of candy, and blow the money on a sugar rush at the video arcade. Something I would totally never do under normal circumstances. I will take the GIVE stack and walk down the street to the homeless shelter and give it to the folks there. I will take the SAVE stack and deposit it in my brokerage account.
The point of this? To learn the value of a $1. To learn that money can be FUN. To learn that money can HELP those in NEED. To learn that money can help me SAVE for my future.
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Take a note book and write down EVERY cent you spend for a week. I did it one time and was shocked at how much I spent on junk. I also look at the price of something and figure out how long I worked to earn that much money. If I wouldn’t work that long if the payment was the thing I’m thinking about buying I don’t buy it. Example: “Would you work for a year if at the end of that time the only pay you you would get was that new car you were looking at?” If the answer is no I don’t purchase it.
I have been learning to trade futures for 1 year. It took me several months to recover my initial losses and expenses, however after I broke even I began to make steady profits.
Being very bearish on the US economy, I shorted quite a few ES contracts and sold USD against EUR and JPY. After making higher profits in a day than some people I know make in a month, I started to have a crisis about the value of money. This feeling of not having truly “earned” the profits caused me to give some of them back to the market by breaking my own rules.
I’ve mostly recovered from that now. However, making money trading does have an effect on how you perceive value. It is also isolating as those who have never made money trading will not understand. Thank you for your article – it is most helpful and I’ve come across your website at perhaps the best time!
I appreciate you writing this blog. In the process of becoming vegan five years ago and evaluating every aspect of my life i have come to realize also how out of balance my idea of money and wealth truely are. In an effort to understand this i got rid of most of my possesions, which if truth be told was not much, and kept several different spending journals as well as starting putting 10% of my paychecks away for my nieces college fund. This monthly give and take has taught me to understand at least in part what money means and can do. I appreciate your technique because it goes the rest of the way and allows me to understand truly what the value of a single dollar is.