Debt, Credit Card & Consolidation Current News Digest

Albert Einstein has long been considered a genius by the masses. He was a theoretical physicist, philosopher, author, and is perhaps the most influential scientists to ever live.

Einstein has made great contributions to the scientific world, including the theory of relativity, the founding of relativistic cosmology, the prediction of the deflection of light by gravity, the quantum theory of atomic motion in solids, the zero-point energy concept, and the quantum theory of a monatomic gas which predicted Bose–Einstein condensation, to name a few of his scientific contributions.

Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”

He’s published more than 300 scientific works and over 150 non-scientific works. Einstein is considered the father of modern physics and is probably the most successful scientist there ever was.

10 Amazing Lessons from Albert Einstein:

1. Follow Your Curiosity

   “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”

   What peaks your curiosity? I am curious as to what causes one person to succeed while another person fails; this is why I’ve spent years studying success. What are you most curious about? The pursuit of your curiosity is the secret to your success.

2. Perseverance is Priceless
   
   

   “It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

   Through perseverance the turtle reached the ark. Are you willing to persevere until you get to your intended destination? They say the entire value of the postage stamp consist in its ability to stick to something until it gets there. Be like the postage stamp; finish the race that you’ve started!

3. Focus on the Present

   “Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.”

   My father always says you cannot ride two horses at the same time. I like to say, you can do anything, but not everything. Learn to be present where you are; give your all to whatever you’re currently doing.

   Focused energy is power, and it’s the difference between success and failure.

4. The Imagination is Powerful

   “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions. Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

   Are you using your imagination daily? Einstein said the imagination is more important than knowledge! Your imagination pre-plays your future. Einstein went on to say, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination.” Are you exercising your “imagination muscles” daily, don’t let something as powerful as your imagination lie dormant.

5. Make Mistakes

   “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”

   Never be afraid of making a mistake. A mistake is not a failure. Mistakes can make you better, smarter and faster, if you utilize them properly. Discover the power of making mistakes. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, if you want to succeed, triple the amount of mistakes that you make.

6. Live in the Moment

   “I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.”

   The only way to properly address your future is to be as present as possible “in the present.”

   You cannot “presently” change yesterday or tomorrow, so it’s of supreme importance that you dedicate all of your efforts to “right now.” It’s the only time that matters, it’s the only time there is.

7. Create Value

   “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.”

   Don’t waste your time trying to be successful, spend your time creating value. If you’re valuable, then you will attract success.

   Discover the talents and gifts that you possess, learn how to offer those talents and gifts in a way that most benefits others.

   Labor to be valuable and success will chase you down.

8. Don’t Expect Different Results

   “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

   You can’t keep doing the same thing everyday and expect different results. In other words, you can’t keep doing the same workout routine and expect to look differently. In order for your life to change, you must change, to the degree that you change your actions and your thinking is to the degree that your life will change.

9. Knowledge Comes From Experience

   “Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.”

   Knowledge comes from experience. You can discuss a task, but discussion will only give you a philosophical understanding of it; you must experience the task first hand to “know it.” What’s the lesson? Get experience! Don’t spend your time hiding behind speculative information, go out there and do it, and you will have gained priceless knowledge.




10. Learn the Rules and Then Play Better

    “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”

    To put it all in simple terms, there are two things that you must do. The first thing you must do is to learn the rules of the game that you’re playing. It doesn’t sound exciting, but it’s vital. Secondly, you must commit to play the game better than anyone else. If you can do these two things, success will be yours!

Thank you for reading and be sure to pass this article along!

I did it! After months of struggling and hours upon hours of typing, I’ve finally reached that mythical state of Inbox Zero. My inbox is empty — or nearly so. (I still have a handful of messages about stuff I’m actually working on at this moment, such as publicity for the book.)

I do have a stack of 74 guest-post submissions (including many reader stories), but I’m not including those in this tally. I’ll process those gradually, sending replies as quickly as I can. (If you’ve submitted a guest post, please be patient. I have dozens of them to get through, and can’t answer you all at once.)

While sorting through the last 200 e-mail messages today, I found lots of great stuff you folks had submitted. Here are some of the best bits sent to me over the past few months:

Carmen sent me this article from CNN/Money about living on a cash-only diet. The piece profiles five families that have given up their credit cards and are only using cash. Each family has a different motive and a different story. (Some of this covers ground we explored last month in our discussion about saying “no” to credit cards.)

Jill forwarded an article from (never home)maker in which the author shares five critical reasons you must read your bills. Her mortgage company made a $4,070 mistake. If she hadn’t been paying attention, she would have paid way way too much. Yet another example of how nobody cares more about your money than you do, so stay on top of things!

The folks at Your Money Bus wanted me to mention their work. The “buck-mobile” (my name, not theirs) is traveling around the country, providing a place where financial planners can meet with people and offer free advice. Here’s a list of scheduled stops.

Sam over at Getting Finances Done has begun his 12 weeks to fiscal fitness program. If you’re getting started with personal finance, check this out.

Meanwhile, the people at What Would John Templeton Say? are having a contest for bloggers: Write about some of Templeton’s advice, and you might win $500. (Templeton was a famous investor, and is the Templeton in Franklin Templeton mutual funds.)

Finally, Chris asked me if I could tell you about his project, Be Debt Free America. Apparently this is a tool that helps you create a “debt snowball payoff report”, although the site isn’t transparent enough for my tastes. I’d like to see more screenshots and know more about how this works. Why would I choose this over a free spreadsheet?

Okay, back to work. I have to be sure that nobody has tried to send me e-mail in the past fifteen minutes. Must defend Inbox Zero!

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Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly:

• Backlog of Reader Submissions
• Return of the Daily Links
• Daily Links: A Fool and His Money Edition
• Daily Links: Compound Interest, Web Income, and Happiness
• Daily Roundup: Bringing Home the Bacon Edition

This guest post from Andrea is part of the new “reader stories” feature here at Get Rich Slowly. Some reader stories contain general “how I did X” advice, and others will be examples of how a GRS reader achieved financial success — or failure.

I am a graduate student, working towards a PhD, and I hope to graduate in 2012. Prior to starting my PhD program I acquired a significant amount of student loan debt while working on a Master’s degree. I also had a small amount of debt left over from my undergraduate degree. In total I had accumulated around $70,000 in student loans.

Some people might say that isn’t too bad considering that I already had completed my Master’s degree, and would not be acquiring any new loans while pursuing my PhD. But I had lived paycheck to paycheck for the two years I worked between college and graduate school, and I didn’t want to live that way anymore. I didn’t want that much debt hanging over me, potentially impacting my future career decisions, so I decided to start paying back the loans while still in school.

A rude awakening
While I wouldn’t say that I regret taking out so much in loans for a Master’s degree, and I’m not sure that I would do anything differently if I had the chance, it is different looking at that dollar amount from the other side. I think this is a potential trap that all students can fall into, both undergraduate and graduate, when deciding where to go to school: The financial implications of having to pay back those loans are so far outside your perspective when you sign a promissory note; it’s not until you graduate and have to figure out how you’re going to pay hundreds of dollars every month for the next decade or two that the weight of your decision finally hits you!

It was with the realization that I’d be paying $800 a month for 20 years according to the “standard repayment plan,” and would end up paying as much in interest as the original loan amount, that I decided to embark on a much more aggressive repayment plan. I am very lucky because I have a husband who works full time and is able to help support me while I am in school. I also was lucky to obtain a training grant that is paying both my tuition and a stipend for my PhD program. Not all graduate students are so lucky.

However, I also work very hard to find other sources of income, and for the past year or so I have budgeted my income very carefully to start paying back some of my debt. While my stipend is enough to live on, it would not provide much extra for paying off loans. So to earn extra money I work part time doing research for a professor in my department.

At times it has been difficult balancing work and school, but in addition to providing extra money it also teaches me time management, and gives me extra experience to put on my resume, which will hopefully help me get a better job when I graduate.

I also take advantage of opportunities to be a Teaching Assistant, which pays $1500 (pre-tax) for each 8-week course. Through the combination of my stipend, working part time, and being a teaching assistant, I was able to take home around $36,000 in 2009.

While this isn’t a huge amount of money, it is a pretty decent income for a graduate student. However, what was more important for me wasn’t how much I was making each month, but how I was budgeting that money. I used an Excel spreadsheet to carefully budget my money each month, allocating money for utilities, groceries, car insurance, my Roth IRA (which I max out each year, since it is the only retirement account I can have as a graduate student), and discretionary spending.

Destroying debt
I set a goal of allotting at least $1000 every month to go towards student loans. My budget was not super strict — my husband and I are careful with our spending, but we do go out to eat and to the movies, and we buy things when we really want them. We pay off our credit cards in full each
month, own just one car, and pack lunches.

By following this reasonable budget I was able to pay off $18,246.45 between May 2008 and September 2009. Here’s the break down of how I did it:

I used a combination of the debt snowball approach and paying off the highest interest loan first. I also chose to make payments in large chunks rather than a set amount on the same day each month. I knew I wanted to pay off the private loan early because it was accruing interest, but I also tackled one of my undergrad loans early on, because I could pay it off in one payment (the December 2008 payment). My final payment in September 2009 paid off the last of my undergraduate loans, just in time for my five-year reunion.

Back on track
For the last few months, I’ve taken a break from this aggressive loan paying, in part because the point I’m at in my degree program didn’t allow me to work as much recently. But I’m ready to tighten my budget again, and plan to devote at least $500 a month to my graduate student loans, comprised mostly of a Federal Direct loan now totaling just over $50,000 because about half of the amount is not subsidized and is accruing interest at 6.8% (a fixed rate — thanks a lot Uncle Sam!). In addition to putting money towards this loan I plan to save money in different “buckets” in my ING account for things like future travels and home improvements.

I wanted to share my story because I am an avid reader of Get Rich Slowly, and I hope I can inspire other young people out there struggling with student loan debt. You don’t have to stick to the “standard repayment plan” — most student loans have no prepayment penalties. Even if you don’t make a lot of money, it is possible to find extra money in your budget to pay down student loans early.

Reminder: This is a story from one of your fellow readers. Please be nice. After nearly a decade of blogging, I have a thick skin, but it can be scary to put your story out in public for the first time. Remember that this guest author isn’t a professional writer, and is just learning about money like you are.

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Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly:

• Ask the Readers: So Much Debt, So Little Time?
• Reader Story: Tackling Debt Through Volunteer Work
• How One College Student Handles Credit Cards
• Federal Student Loan Consolidation Primer
• Ask the Readers: Can College Students Save Money?

This guest post from Maria is part of the new “reader stories” feature here at Get Rich Slowly. Some reader stories contain general “how I did X” advice, and others will be examples of how a GRS reader achieved financial success — or failure. This story very much reminds me of the book for unmarried couples I reviewed earlier this week.

This is a story about a relationship between two people and some money.

Part 1
Boy meets girl. Boy moves in with girl. Household expenses are split and all seems well. Years pass. Boy wants to change cities for professional reasons. Girl wants to finish grad school. They make a deal: They’ll move when the degree is finished.

Warning signs: She is paying a greater share as the years go by and her career advances. He doesn’t take any concrete steps toward advancing his own career. He has sold his car ‘to save money’ and relies on her to drop him at the train station for his job. He has no real friends and his ‘project partners’ (in six years, there’s only one finished project) all seem to be women. And then:

Part 2
The degree is finished and true to the deal, she starts organizing a move. She researches new jobs cross-country. She rents a truck, makes hotel reservations, and arranges for a friend to drive the car in caravan with them. Oh, by the way, she’ll pay the friend’s airfare home. She puts down the money on an apartment. She lands a job, but he says he needs some time off work to get things going. They make a new deal: She’ll cover the rent for a while so he can concentrate on jump-starting his career. Years pass. His career hasn’t started. The subject comes up fairly often, but she hates to fight.

Warning signs: By the end of three years, not only is she paying all living expenses, she’s giving him an allowance to cover his “career-building” expenses. He hasn’t held a job since the move. His ‘project partners’ still all seem to be women. He has built no social or professional network and does not participate in her social life. (This didn’t bother her much when she was in grad school, but life is different now.) She doesn’t really want to live alone, and she tells herself he isn’t costing her much more than it would cost to live alone; but their relationship has become that of roommates. And then:

Part 3
She takes up an activity she’s passionate about. He isn’t interested. She meets someone new and tells her roommate she wants to pursue the new relationship. He panics. He asks her to marry him. He argues. He threatens. He marches her into the bank and stands at her back while she takes cash advances on six credit cards, a total of $30,000. He deposits the money in his own account. She tells him that they can’t continue to live together, and she can’t afford to move because she doesn’t have the money for a deposit. He won’t move out. She starts spending most nights and weekends away.

Warning signs: The whole situation.

Part 4
After months of misery, she is able to finally get him out by renting a truck, packing it with almost all their possessions, and driving it to his sister’s home nearby. With the expenses of the move, her own living expenses, and the extortion debt, she is barely making ends meet. She has no savings and no assets. She talks things over with the new partner. They decide bankruptcy may be the best solution. She asks around and gets the name of a firm of attorneys.

Part 5
The attorneys hear the story, go through all the paperwork, and agree that going after the ex in court would be both expensive and unlikely to result in restitution. A bankruptcy petition is prepared and filed, at a cost of a few hundred dollars. She has to appear in court. She feels like an idiot, a failure, a disappointment to herself. The judge hears a brief statement of her reasons for the petition, nods, signs off. That’s all. Ten years later, the bankruptcy is off the credit report. Had she not filed, she would still be making payments on the debt.

Author’s note
This is a true story. I’ve heard similar stories from half a dozen women, and a couple of men, in my city. At least I never married him. At least I didn’t have to smuggle my belongings to my office and store them under my desk until I had all the essentials together, and leave for a new state from the office, like one of my friends did. At least I wasn’t that scared.

In hindsight, perhaps I should have either moved out immediately or had the bank call the police. But I didn’t want to feel responsible if he hurt himself, I surely didn’t want him to hurt anyone else, and his behavior was sufficiently frightening that I believed one of those outcomes was possible. So I bought him off.

What is the moral of this story?
Don’t cover expenses for another able-bodied adult without a contract, and don’t make financial deals that only favor one party.

Reminder: This is a story from one of your fellow readers. Please be nice. After nearly a decade of blogging, I have a thick skin, but it can be scary to put your story out in public for the first time. Remember that this guest author isn’t a professional writer, and is just learning about money like you are.

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Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly:

• Reader Success Story: Debt Free on $2,000 a Month
• Sometimes Free is Expensive: A Cautionary Tale
• You Can Learn a Lot From a Rich Girl
• This American Life: Something for Nothing
• Blogathon Theme: Funny Money

To many, Donald Trump is considered to be one of the most successful individuals of our generation. Trump is an American business entrepreneur, author, socialite and television personality. He is the Chairman and CEO of the Trump Organization, as well as a famous real-estate developer.

Donald is also the founder of Trump Entertainment Resorts, a company which operates a multiplicity of casinos and hotels all around the world. Trump’s lavish lifestyle and witty personality has made him a celebrity, and his hit reality television show, The Apprentice, has solidified this status.

Today I want to talk about seven things we can learn from the billionaire Donald Trump. Any person who could amass such success is bound to be an inspiration.

7 Success Lessons from Donald Trump

1. Focus on the Present
   
   

   “I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That’s were the fun is.”

   Yesterday is buried, and tomorrow is not yet born; the only progress that can be made toward success has to be done in the present moment, so I recommend that you focus all of your energies into making the present moment as productive as possible. If you don’t, your past will duplicate itself into your future.

2. Fail Forward

   “Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.”

   Never fear failure, failure is the path to success. If at first you don’t succeed, then … that makes sense. Success takes time and it requires failure, through the process of failing you will discover how to succeed. Don’t fear failing, fear not giving your all.

3. Think Big

   “As long as you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big.”

   It takes no more time to think big as it does to think small. Plan for big things in your life, there’s always room at the top for the person who’s willing to think bigger. Leave “little thinking” for people who want to accomplish little things, but not you. Success begins with thinking big.

4. Do What You Love

   “If you’re interested in ‘balancing’ work and pleasure, stop trying to balance them. Instead make your work more pleasurable.”

   I saw a billboard the other day that said, “Life is too short to eat oatmeal,” I don’t know about that, but I do know that life is too short to do work that you despise. Trump said, “I don’t make deals for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it, to do it.” Whatever you do, you must do it, to do it, because you will only have success doing what you love!

5. Stay Positive

   “What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate.”

   Nothing is more constant then “change.” What worked for someone else will not necessarily work for you on your path to success. Challenges that others did not have, you may have. What separates the winners from the losers is that winners react positively to unforeseen challenges. Winners go over the hurdles that stop others.




6. Passion is Power

   “Without passion you don’t have energy; without energy you have nothing.”

   The main ingredient for success is energy. Nothing great can ever be accomplished with out “amazing” levels of energy, and energy comes from passion, so what’s the lesson? Always follow your passion, and you will always have the energy to accomplish your dreams.

7. Experience is Priceless
   
   

   “Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.”

   You need experience; there are things that experience will teach you that you can’t learn in any other way. Never underestimate the value of getting your hands dirty. With experience come priceless lessons that will position you for success.

Hopefully you’ve been able to gain some insights from Donald’s wisdom.

To recap: Always remember to: Focus on the present, fail forward, think big, do what you love, stay positive, and know that passion is power and experience is priceless.

Thank you for reading and be sure to pass this along!

I am a huge fan of Gary Vaynerchuk. If you’ve never heard of him, he became famous for his online TV show, Wine Library TV, in which he brings wine tasting to the masses. Rather than being uppity and condescending, Gary’s everyman style is down-to-earth, passionate, and fun. He’s been known to compare wine to various breakfast cereals, candy, and even dirt occasionally. 2009 was a breakout year of sorts, with the publishing and promotion of his best-selling book Crush It!.

Before we get going, let me share what I love about Gary:

1. His admonition that in order to become successful, you need to hustle.
   Hooray! Finally someone on the internet that is not selling seven easy steps to make a bazillion dollars in four minutes a week. The people who accomplished really big stuff did it with a lot of freaking hard work.
2. His personable style.
   Gary is the man when it comes to connecting with his community. It comes down to one word: he cares. Okay, that’s two, but there’s no doubt that Gary is sincere in his love and appreciation for his fans and customers. Most businesses could use more of that.
3. His childlike passion and enthusiasm.
   Not just for wine, but for life in general. Watch Gary for five minutes and you’ll see a little boy who treats every day like Christmas morning.

Understandably, many people are eager to hear what Gary has to say about making it big and are willing to adopt his tenets in order to achieve their own success. But I find it alarming how often we chase down the secrets to success (whatever that is for us) without ever stopping to consider the side effects of the ideas we are so eager to implement.

In his speeches, Gary often advocates 18-hour days as a necessity for becoming successful. He certainly practices what he preaches. The long hours he works are common knowledge to those who follow him. With book promotion, media appearances, speaking engagements, consulting work, and his involvement in several businesses, he seems to be always on the go. He’s made public his desire to answer every single email he gets. Recently, he shared that he’s backlogged several months. To me, he appears trapped in a prison of everyone else’s expectations. But there’s no doubt: Gary works hard, hustles, and is busy beyond belief.

But I just can’t help but wonder, to what end?

He has admitted that his lack of sleep has contributed to an increase in feeling sick all the time. He appears to be a wonderful family man, but I can’t help but wonder how much time he is actually able to give to them with everything he has going on. I’m concerned that he will burn himself out. The stress he puts on his body might put him out of commission, which would be bad for him, his family and his myriad projects.

I realize that I’m flirting with danger here. After all, I don’t really know Gary Vaynerchuk. All I have to go by are the slices he shares online and in his speeches and book. Ultimately, his life and his choices are his business, not mine. But from an outsider’s perspective, he reminds me of many of the people in the audiences I speak to throughout the country. Even if I am completely and utterly wrong about my perception of Gary — and I hope I am — I still believe this is a discussion that needs to be had.

Because you know what? This post is not really about Gary Vaynerchuk. It’s about all of us.

What are we working for?

What are we really trying to accomplish?

Who are we trying to impress?

Ask anyone to name the most important thing in their life. Most would put family and relationships at the top of the list. And while it’s terribly easy to spout answers that make us sound like Ward Cleaver, it’s excruciatingly hard to look in the mirror and analyze whether or not our ACTIONS really line up with our WORDS.

In 2009, Inc. Magazine asked the CEOs of the year’s fastest-growing privately-owned companies the question, “Who is your biggest inspiration?” Kevin Burke of Centuria said this:

“My father probably — he’s a retired Fortune 500 CEO and a complete failure in the rest of his life. His mistakes motivate me to find a better path.”

I’ve shared stories with my wife Kim about business tycoons and internet celebrities who have achieved, in the words of Borat, “great success!” They enjoy varying degrees of fame, influence, and wealth. And, even though they are dizzy with exciting projects and joint ventures, they all speak about how important family time is to them. They seem to have it all together.

Kim has often suspected that their spouses might tell a different story.

When it comes down to it, the big question regarding family time and life balance is this: How important can anything be that you spend only a tiny percentage of your day (or week) on? And don’t give me the company line about your emphasis on “quality time.”

Quality time is a load of crap.

We are so quick to brag about spending “quality time” with our kids as a way to prove that we have life balance. The error is that we’re using our own definition of quality, not our kids’. The real question to ask is:

Does your kid consider your time together to be quality time?

Or is it organized activity and forced conversation squeezed into short time slots here and there?

The real world reveals the truth about quality time. A number of fathers could tell you about spending an entire day fishing with their child. You enjoy a great lunch on the boat, share some good laughs, soak in some sunshine, and even catch a few bluegill. But it’s only in the last ten minutes — as you’re turning into the driveway — when your kid finally opens up about getting bullied at school.

Your kids need quantity time out of the relationship with you. It’s not their job to be able to fit all of their stories and questions and hopes and dreams and fears into the sliver of time you’ve carved out as “quality time.”

Sometimes a meaningful interaction only takes five minutes. But sometimes you need five hours to get to that five minutes.

There are scores of people in the speaking business who are divorced or have kids that hate them. Why? They’re good people. But even though they accomplished important things and helped a lot of folks, they didn’t spend enough time on the things that mattered most. They allowed their careers to keep them on the road several hundred days a year. Ultimately, their “quality time” wasn’t enough.

The answer here is not an all-or-nothing one. I’m not suggesting that working hard is bad or that spending every waking minute with your family is the ideal. As usual, the answer lies somewhere in the middle and is difficult to find.

A mentor of mine offered some great advice early on in our relationship. He said, “Enough is as good as a feast.”

When you’re full, it doesn’t matter how many other things there are on the dessert cart. By all means, decide what’s most important to you and go out and grab it. Just don’t be afraid to let the other stuff pass by.

Success can be addicting and it’s easy to say yes to opportunities and projects that promise more of it. We can drive ourselves crazy in that pursuit, and we can drive away the people we love the most while we do it. Sometimes we need to say no to very good things in order to say yes to the best things.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wake up when I’m eighty-nine with a pillow full of regrets. I need reminders from time to time to take stock of my own life to make sure the highway I find myself on is actually leading in a direction that I actually want to go.

This post is an effort to be that reminder for all of us.

This post is from GRS staff writer April Dykman.

For many people, mindful consumerism starts with questioning the desire to buy Stuff. The reason might be to save money or avoid clutter — maybe both. It’s the first part of a journey to differentiate needs from wants and make mindful decisions about where to spend our hard-earned money.

But at some point, most of us will consume. We’ll buy food or clothing or household items. We’ll need to replace something, fix something, or upgrade something. When we make these purchases, we’re playing a role in a process. Much goes into creating a product and getting it on the shelf, though as a consumer, we don’t see that process. We don’t know if the companies involved in bringing it to us have decent working conditions for employees, pollute water systems, or include additives that pose health risks to our families.

Daniel Goleman, author of Ecological Intelligence: The Hidden Impacts of What We Buy, wrote about considering the global effects of our purchases in his essay, Making the Right Choice:

An organic cotton t-shirt may be called “green” because they didn’t use pesticides or chemical fertilizers when growing the cotton. That’s on the good side of the ledger, to be sure, but if we look into the life cycle of the t-shirt, we discover that organic cotton fibers are shorter than other fibers, so you need to grow a lot more cotton per t-shirt. Cotton is typically raised in arid parts of the world, and it’s a very thirsty crop, so a lot of water is implicated in the production of the t-shirt.

Also, if it’s a colored t-shirt, we have to take into account that textile dyes tend to be carcinogenic. When we consider all these angles, we may come to see that if you change one thing about a product and leave 999 unchanged, it’s not green.

It’s enough to make the average consumer’s head spin. Most people would like to make informed choices and reward companies whose processes make us feel good, but doing this in practice is daunting. If a busy parent is in the grocery store with two children to wrangle, it’s not feasible for that person to stop and trace the life cycles of Cheesy Poufs versus Cheddar Puffs. People can’t be expected to spend hours on the web researching the health, societal, and environmental effects of every purchase. Not gonna happen.

Technology provides the tools
Luckily, it’s getting easier to know what’s behind a brand. Skin Deep and GoodGuide are two web databases that provide the backstory on the Stuff we buy.

• Skin Deep is a safety guide to cosmetics and personal care products researched by the Environmental Working Group. You can search by product, ingredient, or company, and the site will return a hazard rating with the product broken down by ingredients.
• GoodGuide is a database of more than 70,000 food, toys, personal care, and household products that rates the products and companies based on the effects they have so that users can make informed decisions based on what is important to them.

For example, GoodGuide provides information about Quaker Quick Oats, which it rates a 7.3 overall (out of 10), and Nature’s Path Organic Instant Hot Oatmeal, which is rated 6.7. We might assume that the organic brand would be healthier, but in fact it’s higher in sugar than similar products. When it comes to environmental effects, Quaker Quick Oats scores lower for water and energy management. Users can delve deeper into how these ratings are determined by clicking on See All Data.

The brainchild of Dara O’Rourke, a professor at University of California-Berkeley, GoodGuide was developed with experts from Harvard and MIT, with tech input from talent at Google, eBay, Amazon, and Intuit. And the tech part is what makes GoodGuide great. The database is available as an iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad app that allows users to scan barcodes and compare products. Users also can create personalized shopping lists and lists of products to avoid, making it easier shop mindfully when you’re on the go.

Start small
If you’re interested learning more about where your Stuff comes from, make a few changes and build from there. Don’t feel like you have to throw out all of the “bad” Stuff you own and replace it with the “good” Stuff. To start, pick one product you’re curious about, and see if it’s listed on Good Guide or Skin Deep. How does it score? Is there a better alternative that will still meet your needs? Often the better-rated product also is the less expensive, which is a great bonus. In fact, I’ve slowly replaced my skin-care products with cheaper products that also rate better when it comes to health and societal effects. Sometimes the expensive products packaged in “green”-looking bottles rate surprising low.

I’m interested to know what you think about databases like Skin Deep and GoodGuide. Have you ever wondered how some of the products you buy get to the shelf? Would you use tools like these to learn more about the effects of the Stuff you buy?

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Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly:

• Obsessive Consumption
• Word2Word: Free Online Language Tools
• links for 2007-04-16
• Use a No-Spend Month to Become Mindful of Money
• links for 2006-11-21

This guest post from Michelle is part of a new feature here at Get Rich Slowly. Every Sunday will include a reader story (in the new “reader stories” category). Some will be general “how I did X” stories, and others will be examples of how a GRS reader achieved financial success.

In 2001, I got a new job. Not just any job — this job was for a former employer who wanted me to come back to work for them after about two years of working for a nonprofit agency. Their offer was very, very tempting. It meant a 50% raise. (Yes, 50%. Take your current income, divide it half and add it to your salary. Fun, huh?)

The money got to me, and I left my nonprofit job for this new opportunity. I was happy with my old job and had good friends at both organizations, so my motivation for the change was purely the increased income.

The lure of money
About four months into this new job, I was sitting in a beige cube and wondering where all my money was. I had been collecting checks that were indeed 50% more (in terms of my gross income at least — I was paying more in taxes, so it didn’t calculate out as a 50% raise in my take-home pay). But it was still significantly more money than I thought I would ever earn, and I couldn’t figure out why I still felt broke.

Looking around those beige walls, I despaired at the idea of living the rest of my life like this. If this huge salary increase wasn’t the answer to happiness, what was?

I went home and went through my financial statements. My husband and I have joint accounts and have used Quicken since the beginning of our relationship, so this part was easy. After looking through Quicken for about 20 minutes, I could see where that extra money had gone. We’d taken a couple of trips. We were eating out a lot more. We joined a gym. We bought a new car. We were spending my 50% raise almost as I got it.

My husband and I had struggled with credit card debt early in our marriage and overcome it. When we spent money, we used debit cards and had cash in the bank to cover it. Big expenses (those vacations) went on a credit card, but were paid off right away. But we had $20,000 in student loans from both our college educations and a new car in the driveway with a $21,000 loan on it. Those debts felt like anvils hanging around my neck.

My job was okay, but I was finding the work a little tedious and dull. The bigger paychecks did not completely make up for the loss of creativity and the corporate hassles that came with my new responsibilities.

I thought what I wanted my life to look like: It wasn’t sitting in a beige cube.

Debt is slavery
I realized that I’d basically sold myself into slavery doing a job that paid well but didn’t give me a great deal of satisfaction in order to have more money to spend. But spending the money wasn’t bringing me happiness. I felt worse, not better.

So I decided my best option was to reconfigure my life so that I didn’t need to earn as much money as I did currently, thereby giving me more freedom to pursue work that made me happy, no matter what my paycheck looked like.

And that’s what I did. Over the next two-and-a-half years, I paid off the student loans and the car loan by reducing my expenditures and doubling my monthly payments (using the same advice you can find right here at Get Rich Slowly). Every extra bit of money my husband or I got in from freelance work or bonuses went straight on the loans.

After three years at that job, I got laid off in 2004 when the company moved our office to the East Coast. Instead of being stressed and worried about finding a job that would pay well enough to replace my income level, I rejoiced in the fact that I had no debt except my reasonable mortgage payment. I was free at last to do what I wanted to do.

I happily collected my unemployment insurance and severance pay while I worked on setting up my own business. Now I work as a writer, editor, and website developer for small businesses. I’m doing things I enjoy, and after five years, my part-time income matches that full-time salary I earned while staring at those beige walls.

Buying freedom
What I’d done was decide to spend my increased income from that job on buying myself freedom. It took more than just money. It took a paradigm shift on my part to determine what I really wanted from my life and my money. It turned out that what I wanted wasn’t more money after all. Helping my clients succeed and spending more time with my family bring me more happiness than money can buy.

I’d like to say that this process is a journey, not a destination. I still struggle sometimes with strong desires to have more money to buy things like vacations for my family or a slightly bigger home. Remembering this experience helps keep me grounded, and I can refocus on what I truly value. I’ve recently decided more freedom is more desirable, and my husband and I are working towards paying off our 15-year mortgage early, too. I know that nothing I can buy is going to feel as good as holding the deed to my own home in my hand. I’m looking forward to working towards that goal next.

Reminder: This is a story from one of your fellow readers. Please be nice. After nearly a decade of blogging, I have a thick skin, but it can be scary to put your story out in public for the first time. Remember that this guest author isn’t a professional writer, and is just learning about money like you are.

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Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly:

• The Seven Enemies of Financial Success
• links for 2007-06-15
• Working Dollars: Investment Lessons from 1957
• Daily Links: Calm Before the Storm Edition
• The Best of Get Rich Slowly: August 2008

Tony Robbins is an infamous American self-help author and one of the top motivational speakers in the world. His bestselling books include Unlimited Power and my personal favorite Awaken the Giant Within.

Robbins began his career promoting seminars for motivational speaker Jim Rohn. He began working for Jim when he was 18 years old, and worked with him until he was 22.

Later Robbins began hosting seminars which included teachings on neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) which he learned from NLP co-founder John Grinder. Eventually Robbins incorporated firewalking into his seminars; this is something he learned from Tolly Burkan.

Robbins has used infomercials to promote his seminars and products and although Robbins is known for being a motivational speaker, he refers to himself as a peak performance coach rather than a motivational speaker. Robbins believes that coaching is more important than motivation.

7 Amazing Lessons from Tony Robbins:

1. Focus

   
   

   “One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular.”

   
   Nothing is more critical than focus. If you fail to reach your goal, it is because somewhere along the way your focus was “broken.” Focus is power; a focused person can accomplish more than 100 individuals who are merely interested.




2. Realize That Decisions Decide Destinies
   
   
   

   “It’s not what’s happening to you now or what has happened in your past that determines who you become. Rather, it’s your decisions about what to focus on, what things mean to you, and what you’re going to do about them that will determine your ultimate destiny.”

   
   More than anything else, your decisions decide your future. Its how you play the cards that you’ve been dealt that matters most. Decisions decide destinies! The decision to further pursue your education, the decision on who you marry, the decision to start your own business, the decision to just sit around and make excuses; your life is a result of the decisions that you’ve made.

3. Recognize the Path to Success

   
   

   “The truth of the matter is that there’s nothing you can’t accomplish if: (1) You clearly decide what it is that you’re absolutely committed to achieving, (2) You’re willing to take massive action, (3) You notice what’s working or not, and (4) You continue to change your approach until you achieve what you want, using whatever life gives you along the way.”

   
   Wow, what a quote! This is the path to success.

   Anybody can make excuses and say “you have to be lucky to succeed,” but the truth is, we all have the power to succeed, however we’re all not willing to do what it takes to succeed (that’s the difference). Most prefer to sit on the side-line, or play Monday morning quarterback.

4. Raise Your Standard

   
   

   “Any time you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards. When people ask me what really changed my life eight years ago, I tell them that absolutely the most important thing was changing what I demanded of myself. I wrote down all the things I would no longer accept in my life, all the things I would no longer tolerate, and all the things that I aspired to becoming. If you don’t set a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in life, you’ll find it’s easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that’s far below what you deserve.”

   
   In life you get what you accept and what you expect. What do you expect from yourself? Do you expect to be average; do you expect to live an average life or to have an average job? What are you accepting? Are you accepting living paycheck to paycheck? Are you accepting barely getting along?

   To succeed you must raise your standard, you must begin to see yourself differently.




5. Major in Major Things

   “Most people fail in life because they major in minor things.”

   Give your time and attention to what matters most. Dedicate your life to doing big things; leave the little things to someone else. Learn to think big, to act big, and your life will take on a new direction.

   Major in major things!

6. Do What You Know To Do

   
   

   “You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action.”

   
   Chances are you already have enough information to dramatically transform your life from the inside-out; you’re just not putting that information into action. It’s not enough to possess knowledge, you must act on what you know in-order to change your destiny.




7. Learn to Follow the Leader
   
   

   “If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you’ll achieve the same results.”

   There’s no sense in re-creating the wheel. Find someone who’s succeeding and do what they did. If it worked for them, it will work for you. Follow the leader, think like the leader, act like the leader, and you will become the leader!

Thank you for reading and be sure to pass this article along!

This is a guest post from Robert Brokamp of The Motley Fool. Robert is a Certified Financial Planner and the advisor for The Motley Fool’s Rule Your Retirement service. He contributes one new article to Get Rich Slowly every two weeks.

Let’s say it’s 8 p.m. on a weekday. Or 2 p.m. on a Saturday. Or maybe 3 a.m. in the middle of a night when you can’t sleep. Whatever time it is, assume it’s a time when you have an hour or two free — you can do whatever you want. What would you do?

If you’re like me, you don’t always do what you should do — something that would move your life forward, or at least relieve some stress, rather than something that just provides a temporary squirt of pleasure. I may read yet another book about World War II rather than work on an article that’s due. I’ll let myself get sucked down the email rabbit hole instead of transferring that IRA to a better broker. I’ll turn on ESPN and watch other people exercise instead of doing it myself.

Why is this? Why do we not do things we know would improve our lives?

When it comes to personal finances, we all know how less-than-optimal ways we spend our time can end up costing us money, or at least peace of mind. There’s late fees, a reluctance to tackle snowballing debt, putting off saving for retirement, missed opportunities to enhance our careers and human capital, not getting a will and other important documents — the list goes on until the break of dawn.

I’m fascinated by this, both as a guy who writes about personal finances as well as someone who doesn’t always do what makes the most sense. I don’t have a definitive answer yet, but here are some things I’ve run across recently that might provide some clues.

Blame it on the brain
In his article “Human Decision-Making: A Scary Thing,” Dr. Jim Phelps says that humans are wired to look for short-term risks and rewards:

Research by psychologists shows that we pay most attention to the risks that are right in front of us. Risks that won’t appear until later, even if they are huge, just don’t get to us the way a risk we face right now does…

People will start a heart exercise program after their heart attack, when the risk of having another attack is now very clear to them. Those people knew about the value of exercise before the heart attack. They aren’t stupid or foolish, they’re human…

Worse yet, solutions with immediate strong benefits strike us as much more attractive than solutions with less immediate results — even if those benefits will be many times greater later! Buy a new TV now instead of investing and letting that money compound interest…

Our minds evolved to handle immediate problems. Is there a saber-tooth tiger out there? Where are we going to find food today? Who can I trust in my social band? Does Joe still owe me a favor? That’s what we “grew up” thinking about.

We’re too tired
You just got home after a long day at the office, but your work isn’t done. You still have to cook the kids, wash the dinner, and put the dishes to bed — or something like that. And then you’re going to analyze that last year’s spending to find ways to save money? Not likely.

Of course, for many of us, nighttime isn’t the only tired time. And when you’re tired, it’s much more difficult to make the choice to do something that doesn’t have immediate rewards.

This is one of the main lessons of The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loeher and Tony Schwartz. As they write:

Every one of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors has an energy consequence, for better or for worse. The ultimate measure of our lives is not how much time we spend on the planet, but rather how much energy we invest in the time that we have. The premise of this book — and of the training we do each year with thousands of clients — is simple enough: Performance, health, and happiness are grounded in the skillful management of energy.

To manage energy, Loeher and Schwartz suggest four principles:

• Principle 1: Full engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.
• Principle 2: Because energy diminishes both with overuse and with underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.
• Principle 3: To build capacity we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do.
• Principle 4: Positive energy rituals—highly specific routines for managing energy—are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance.

We’re hungry, scared, selfish, and horny
Like Dr. Phelps, marketing guru Seth Godin blames our difficulties on the primitive parts in our head, what Godin calls our “lizard brain” (and scientists would call the limbic system). In a speech (that you can watch here), he explained it thusly:

The idea of the lizard brain is this: It is hungry, it is scared, it is selfish, and it is horny. That’s its job. And that’s all it does. All it thinks about is, “How am I going to survive? How am I going to have kids? Get me out of here!”…

Every single time we get close to shipping [that is, completing and delivering a project], every single time the manuscript is ready to send to the publisher, the lizard brain speaks up. The lizard brain says, “They’re gonna laugh at me.” The lizard brain says, “I’m gonna get in trouble.” The lizard brain is screaming at the top of its lungs. So what happens is, we don’t do it. We sabotage it. We hold back. We have another meeting. You don’t need to be more creative. All of you are actually too creative. What you need is a quieter lizard brain.

It seems to me that the lizard brain comes into play when the things we know we should do involve a certain amount of personal risk (real or perceived), and where the stakes are potentially big. This isn’t why we don’t take out the garbage as much as it is about why we don’t take chances to do what we really want to do with our lives.

Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art [J.D.'s review], calls this “Resistance.” Here’s a bit from an interview Pressfield did with Godin that I found simple but all too true:

Pressfield: Do you experience Resistance (meaning self-sabotage, procrastination, self-doubt, etc.)? In what form does Resistance present itself?

Godin: Until you wrote about it in The War of Art, I didn’t know what to call it. For me, the resistance disguises itself as important, even urgent work that could and should be put aside. The resistance most often looks like checking my email. Email is the perfect distraction for me, because it’s fresh, new, and bite-sized. When I turn off email, even for an hour, my productivity triples.

One answer
Which brings us to the solutions portion of our show. I don’t have all the answers (yet), but Leo Babauta over at Zen Habits has a suggestion that I’ve been trying to implement: Identify, and focus on, your most important tasks (MITs):

It’s very simple: your MIT is the task you most want or need to get done today. In my case, I’ve tweaked it a bit so that I have three MITs — the three things I must accomplish today. Do I get a lot more done than three things? Of course. But the idea is that no matter what else I do today, these are the things I want to be sure of doing. So, the MIT is the first thing I do each day, right after I have a glass of water to wake me up. And here’s the key to the MITs for me: at least one of the MITs should be related to one of my goals. While the other two can be work stuff (and usually are), one must be a goal next-action. This ensures that I am doing something to move my goals forward that day.

As Babauta concedes, he didn’t come up with the idea, and he links to a post on Lifehacker that picks up on Godin’s advice:

Author of Never Check Email in the Morning Julie Morgenstern suggests spending the first hour of your workday email-free. Choose one task — even a small one — and tackle it first thing. Accomplishing something out of the gate sets the tone for the rest of your day and guarantees that no matter how many fires you’re tasked with putting out the minute you open your email client, you still can say that you got something done.

That’s just one idea, and may not help with all our sub-optimal behaviors. But this post is long enough. Plus, “The Simpsons” are on, and, well, I’m pretty tired.

—
Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly:

• Ask the Readers: Escaping from an Upside-Down Loan?
• Tomorrow I Will Blog for 24 Hours Straight
• Check Your Local Library for Summer Reading Activities
• Burn After Reading: The $22 Movie
• Blogathon Status: 21 Pledges for $466

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