by Tom Lietaert with Joshua Levin

Most of us feel periodic frustration at how we foolishly spend our money.  I thought I’d start a list of the ways I’ve gone unconscious and let my important resource, money, slip through my fingers.  Each single instance may seem rather trivial.  But how many starving children could have been better served with the $10 I “forked over” to something that does not serve my life’s purpose or mission?  I was disturbed to see that it took me all of two minutes to come up with 10 ways I have not been mindful with my money.

Money is a tool, a system of exchange, through which I express my values and commitments into the world.  When my purchases are aligned with my core values and my mission, they contribute to my fulfillment.  And when they are not aligned they often generate stress.  Reallocating my resources as described below are a few ways that I and my wife are recommitting to our core values.   we’re not only reducing our stress around money, we’re actually being fulfilled and nourished through our purchases.

Here’s my list of unconscious behaviors and the new effective habits I’ve replaced them with:

1. Parking Tickets.  It’s pretty rare that I speed, but I’ve certainly been very generous to the city of Boulder through parking tickets. It’s due in part to forgetting, but underneath that is my wanting to stay with the fun, in fear that if I break the energy of what’s happening in the moment the fun will be lost.

Effective Habit: Making note of the time the meter runs out is a start.  If I’m running out of time I can also make an invitation, to move the fun elsewhere.  Setting the timer on my phone and informing those we’re meeting of our time limit also helps.  Better yet, I can arrive early and park a bit farther away where there the parking is free but less convenient!  Any other ideas come to mind?

2. Buying because it’s a “great deal.”  I’d like to be able to say that much of the junk I’ve accumulated over the years was purchased with great intentions—stuff for my office to make me more efficient, exercise equipment to support my health, a great deal on power tools because I can always use a good power tool.  Honestly, though, I’ve made many purchases because on some level of my being I thought if I purchased an item I’d appear more successful and attractive which would lead to my being more popular.  They were impulse purchases made when I encountered a “special offer” or an item on clearance. These marketing gimmicks are intended to generate a sense of urgency and a corresponding justification about why I simply must have this particular thing!

Effective Habit:  Check in with my wife and/or go home first.  Getting some distance between the object in question and the emotion driving my impulse to purchase often helps put it in proper perspective.  Doing a check-in with my Credit Card Lingerie can also do the trick (for your FREE Credit Card Lingerie, click HERE).  What strategies have you found effective?

3. Fees.  My wife and I actually don’t mind supporting the library with our late fees—we love the library and believe that we get incredible value way beyond anything we pay to support them! But how much money have we thrown away by returning videos a day late?  Or by paying bills late?  How about overdraft fees?

Effective Habit: When we rent a movie, we make sure we check in about our schedules to ensure that one of us can return it on time, if we even bother to rent them at all.  We’ve also put most of our bills on auto pay to our credit card, which we then pay off in full each month so we’re not paying interest.  (NOTE:  this is a strategy I encourage ONLY if you’re financially able and disciplined enough to pay in FULL and ON TIME.  We use a rewards card from which we receive several hundred dollars each year.  I saw a recent statistic that suggests that only about 40% of people intending to do this are successful.)  What other fees can you eliminate?

4.  Lights, heat, water.  How much of our resources get wasted just leaving a light on all night?  How about running the kitchen faucet much longer than I need to at times—on hot no less?

Effective Habit: I only run the dishwasher and washing machine with full loads and air dry the dishes and clothes as much as possible.  I also use only the lights that I need to, turn them off when leaving a room and I turn off my second computer monitor when I’m not using it.  Did you know that most dishes will rinse clean with only cold water?  Who knew?!  During the coldest month of winter our utility bill actually went down because we’ve been very focused on caring for those things we value.  Water saving shower heads can more than pay for themselves in less than a year.  CFL and LED lighting also have cost benefit ratios over time.  What other strategies do you employ for reducing utility costs?

5. Wasted food in the fridge.  A reputable study suggests that most families throw away one third of the food they purchase!   One third!  I don’t know that my wife and I ever approached that level, but we’ve certainly had our share of moldy experiments in the fridge.

Effective Habit:  I’m learning to can food this year.  In fact, I just made my first two batches of jelly!  I also have a dish that I love to make to use up any veggies that are on the edge of going bad.  I’ll write it up and post it as a blog soon.

6. Printing everything I want to read.  With the recent explosion of social media resources, it’s not uncommon for me to see at least three electronic articles a day that I want to read. In the past I downloaded and printed the articles.  I used reams of paper and quarts of ink—and ended up with a stack of articles, most of which I recycled without ever reading.

Effective Habit: Now I copy everything to a folder.  If I still want to read it when I have a window of time, I either read it on the computer or print and read immediately (yeah, I know—I still prefer the copy in hand).  I’m also in the habit of re-using the back side of paper for scribbling notes.  Also big savers are 2-sided printing, print previewing before printing, and only printing the necessary pages. And how about setting default print to Draft to save ink?  Reservation confirmations, emails—what else can you jot down on scrap paper instead of printing?

7. Buying because I have a coupon.  Have you ever bought stuff at the store or go out to dinner because you have a great coupon?  Oh, how many time’s I’ve used an Entertainment coupon with a buy-one-get-one entre’ coupon only to end up spending over $50 when the appetizers, drinks, and dessert were tallied.

Effective Habit:  I only collect coupons for items I regularly use.  And we only use entertainment coupons when we are already planning to go out and are in a mood to explore something new.  What are your effective coupon strategies?

8. Upgrades.  Anyone remember Windows 95?  For my actual needs it would serve me just fine.  My 3 year old flip phone with minimal features, last year’s clothing styles, exercise equipment and sporting goods purchases, kitchen gadgets (I love cool kitchen gadgets), vehicles and more.

Effective Habit:  I believe that unnecessary upgrades are one of the most insidious of my choices.  Keeping up with the Jones’ has never been a fulfilling experience, whereas “upgrading” my personal relationships is always nourishing.  Checking in with my wife is often a quick and easy way for me to hear the “NO” I know that I need to hear!  J  We’ve started investing in games and inviting friends over for game nights and other activities that grow our friendships and community.  Checking in about what value is being expressed and how a purchase is aligned or not aligned with our values helps keep our frivolous spending to a minimum. Where can you reallocate your money to create?

9.  Not reviewing my receipts, invoices, and statements.  Before I started waking up to my own money issues, I avoided dealing with money and bills as much as possible.  Doing my taxes (late) one year, I was reviewing statements and discovered that the coffee shop I visited daily (ah, item number 10…) showed a charge of $125!!  The cashier had clearly made an error that I never caught.  Over the years I’ve found plenty of other errors when reviewing grocery store receipts. As recently as two weeks ago our bank misplaced a check that was deposited—which I had copies of and caught almost immediately.

Effective Habit:  I now look at the prices on the shelves and review receipts as soon as they’re printed.  Our local grocer actually has a scan-right guarantee (first item free if item scans wrong price) which has saved us hundreds of dollars over the years!

10.  Daily incidentals.  I used to buy coffee at nearly $2 a cup.  My wife loved the specialty drinks that cost $4-5 per cup.  When we tallied it up we realized that we were spending over $60 per month on visits to coffee shops each month.  That’s over $720 a year!

Effective Habit: We now buy a good quality coffee and make it at home, and my wife jazzes hers up with cream and caramel syrup on the weekend.  What other “tiny” purchases do I justify because they’re…tiny?  What do ineffective habits with money really cost you?

As you reflect on your ineffective or wasteful spending habits, consider what is driving them.  In what ways can you create new effective habits with money?  Please share your thoughts and new habits you practice below.  If you’re ready to create a better relationship with money, give me a call.

I hear many New Agers and Law of Attraction fans assert that money is neutral, suggesting that since it’s just a form of energy, it doesn’t matter what we manifest. They believe that manifesting is a primary key to happiness and well being. Manifesting abundance, which certainly includes lots of money, is held as the ideal. They dismiss any challenge to this perspective by labeling it as negative thinking, which carries a “low vibration” and is (as everyone knows!) never helpful for manifesting.

Well, I’m about to go to New Age Hell.

To suggest that money is neutral is magical thinking. It’s ignorant, misguided, and irresponsible. Much like The Secret’s perspective on manifesting, it overlooks the consequences* of participating in an economic system rooted in scarcity, and it abdicates any responsibility for doing so.

I’ll explain where I’m coming from and why it matters in a moment. But first, a question: What is money? The most common definition of money is that it’s a medium of exchange. This is true, but it’s overly simplistic.

I consider money a system of exchange. Money operates much like parts in a machine. There has to be more than one piece of money or it would not work. In order for money to function, you and I must have some agreements in place, including what we will use for money, what its value will be, and how can and will it be utilized. The result is a system agreed upon by a group of people.

Have you ever paused to consider the many forms (systems) that money can take? And do you know what system is currently being utilized throughout most of the world? When we choose one system over another system, we are valuing one over the other. And because of this bias, our system cannot be neutral.

Further, each money system has its own unique ideology behind it. And each ideology has its own bias—one money system can be designed to value each person’s time equally. Another can be designed to benefit the owners of the money system. Yet another can be designed to benefit the masses. And each of these systems can be “fiat” (meaning not backed by anything—created “out of thin air,” as they say) or backed by something else agreed upon as having value. These are just a few of the possibilities.

Each system has its own bias, and in choosing one over the other we assess one bias to be more favorable than the others.

Did you know that our current money system, a fiat currency fractional reserve system, is a privately owned system? By its very nature debts incurred by our government can never be fully repaid. It demands greater and greater infusions of currency into the system to keep it from collapsing, which in turn demands greater and greater use of natural resources and is unsustainable. It benefits the owning elites—the bankers—in times of both economic expansion and contraction (dynamics which the bankers are ultimately in control of). It only benefits them economically, though. At a broader level, I believe that our current system is ultimately detrimental to ALL of us.

I believe that our current money system perpetuates much of the pain, suffering, and dysfunction in the world. It undermines all that I personally value and that which I seek to create—a loving, harmonious, just, equitable, and sustainable world.

So, I’ll say it again—the New Agers simply have it wrong. There are consequences to our manifesting. And to participate in the current money system is to participate and perpetuate our worst dysfunctions and scarcity consciousness. Even if we assess that the use of our money is for a good purpose, we’re still participating and perpetuating a destructive system.

I don’t blame folks for buying into the system. We didn’t co-create it, and there’s little education about our money system in the mainstream education system or media.

And this brings me to the ultimate purpose of the money mentoring that I do. I believe that the greatest legacy we can leave our children—a loving, harmonious, just, equitable, and sustainable world—can be attained by transforming our relationship with money. I believe it’s imperative that we understand the nature of money and our personal relationship with it. And it’s the Changemakers—those of us explicitly committed to co-creating a better world—who can best lead the way.

*For further reading: Why the !&*% doesn’t “The Secret” work for me?

I have my sister to thank for my life-changing perspective on trust. She is a recovering alcoholic and, like many addicts, was a master liar and manipulator.

Again and again she would ask me for money, to give her a ride, to loan her something warm to wear, and on and on… Again and again I wanted to support her as an expression of my love and concern for her; I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, hoping that this time her words would be more than just words.

And yet they never were.

Again and again I ended up bitter and resentful. Again and again I blamed her, demonized her and, on occasion, even punished her, at one point I quit speaking with her for over a year. I reported to everyone that she was not trustworthy—and I applied that assessment of not trustworthy across every domain of her life, even if she might have been trustworthy in other areas.

Until my epiphany: I actually can trust her….to be exactly who she is! Knowing her as an alcoholic and pathological liar, I could completely trust her to lie and manipulate, even when it made no sense to lie or manipulate.

It wasn’t her that I couldn’t trust. It was me.

I could not trust myself to make and hold appropriate boundaries with her. I could not trust myself to take care of me and allow her to deal with her own issues. I could not trust myself to give freely—without expectation—knowing she could not help but betray any commitment she would make, no matter how strong her initial intention.

Today before I point the finger of mistrust toward another I first ask myself a few questions:

•What don’t I trust about myself in relation to the characteristic or behavior I’m observing?
•What’s challenging for me about setting a healthy boundary for myself in relation to that characteristic or behavior? Is there something I fear I would lose?
•What self-loving boundary do I need to set for myself to address the territory of concern (a boundary that is about taking care of myself and not about punishing another)?

When I started holding healthy boundaries for myself—after nearly 35 years of not doing so—there was a huge backlash from my sister. For the first couple of years she lashed out at me with a venomous rage. I held my new boundaries firmly and created additional ones to take care of myself. It took a while, but now she’s learned that I’m serious when I state a boundary. Our relationship has become far more loving than it ever was before. And I like to imagine that holding these boundaries has supported her in addressing her addictions, though I see that this thought may be a carryover from my days of codependent fantasy thinking.

This perspective on trust has changed my life and all my relationships. I continue to learn how to hold better and better boundaries, and my relationships continue to get deeper and richer as a result. Most importantly, I trust myself more than ever before.

Are there any relationships in your life where you’ve misdirected the issue of trust? How do you feel as you consider the questions I listed above?

The back story…

by Tom Lietaert with Joshua Levin

[author’s note:] So why am I only now writing about The Secret?   Isn’t it passé, already over-analyzed and excessively critiqued?  The Secret has sold over 19 million copies and is still going strong. And Rhonda Byrne’s new book, The Power, soared to Amazon’s top five in its first week out.  So, while The Secret may be old news for some of us, its impact and appeal remains current. Its popularity makes sense given our quick-fix culture. And as we will see—with fresh eyes and a clear path to authentic fulfillment—we can use this phenomenon as an opportunity to grow.

Once upon a time a movie called The Secret rolled into town like a proud hero on his powerful white stallion. There was great intrigue, excitement, and promises of a new world of possibilities.  The theme of the movie is manifestation, a concept rooted in the Universal Law of Attraction. Simply put, the idea is that we have the ability to literally manifest (bring forth into existence) anything we want into our lives. All we need do is master the techniques laid forth in the movie and enduring happiness will be ours. Sounds pretty good, right?

But many who watched the movie had a sense that something was missing, that the message was misguided. I certainly did. My hope is that by sharing my perspective, and the 3 Keys for Manifesting a Rich Life exercise, I can assist you in using the Law of Attraction in a more satisfying and successful way.

While watching the movie I had a wrenching feeling. I sensed a shadow lurking behind The Secret. I assessed it to be a marketing gimmick—a cleverly wrapped, common marketing tool presenting materialism as a source of happiness and well being. I saw multiple examples of material manifestations, but I wanted to see some mention of spiritual principles in which to ground this information. At the end of the video I found myself asking, “For the sake of what am I manifesting?” And further, “How am I, or the world, better off as a result of my manifesting?”

I realized the great potential for emotional pain for those unable to effectively manifest what they want. They could easily use this apparent failure as evidence of their unworthiness. I envisioned multitudes manifesting resource-intensive goods without regard for the welfare of the planet or anything else beyond their own instinctual desires. Further, when a society adopts a paradigm of manifesting that is ungrounded in spiritual principles, it’s not just the materially poor who suffer. The rich are impacted in a detrimental way too. They tend to develop a sense of entitlement or righteousness, which strengthens their resistance to change and often further isolates them in their attempt to feel empowered.

After hearing so many great reviews about the movie I found myself stewing with anger. As a life coach with training in psychology, I know that one component of anger is that it’s a direct link to our deeply held values, which may be lying unexpressed or even be completely unknown to us. When I allowed my anger with The Secret to connect me to my core values, I was inspired to develop the 3 Keys for Manifesting a Rich Life process and to create Intimacy with Money, a transformational program that aligns people’s money habits with their core values. I discovered a pearl in my angry experience of The Secret. That pearl is a component of my life’s purpose and mission: to create a just, equitable, harmonious, and loving world by transforming our relationships with money.

Does it really matter what we strive to manifest? The popular belief proposed in the movie is that if you want to manifest gold, the universe will deliver gold to you. The supporting belief is that there’s always enough for everyone and that there is enough goodness in the world to counter any potential detrimental consequences.

Perhaps. But to me this is a convenient argument absolving those with material excesses from any sense of responsibility for the outcomes of their choices. If we manifest a chemically toxic environment because we all have resource-intensive, toxic mansions attained by destructive means—such as the huge home illustrated in The Secret—then it must be our children’s karmic destiny to deal with the mess. This is a Calvinistic worldview in which those successful at manifesting are by definition good and righteous and are therefore rewarded, while the rest of us are condemned as not being good enough.

Would it not be prudent to err on the side of caution and consider that there are consequences to our desires? What if I create my personal reality, and we co-create our collective reality? If the sins of the parent are passed on seven generations, then what are the consequences for all that we manifest? I believe that it does matter what we want or seek to manifest, and that there are consequences for all that we choose, both individually and collectively. I believe that there are circumstances beyond our control, not born of our manifestations. (And while we may not be responsible for manifesting them, we ARE responsible for the manner in which we react or respond to them. This is where we can experience real power and authentic choice in our lives.)

What if you were to start your manifesting process by assuming that there are consequences for all of your choices and manifestations, both for yourself and others? What if you were to focus your energies towards manifesting that which embraces and celebrates the interconnectedness of all beings and things? What if you were to stop self-medicating with material wants and expend your energies on introspection, endeavoring to create a rich emotional landscape and finding your fulfillment from within? To suggest that there are consequences for our choices and what we manifest in our lives does not contradict the principles of manifesting, but rather grounds these principles.

Most people believe that their choices are rational. But the process of making a choice does not actually occur in the reasoning part of the brain (the frontal cortex). Choice occurs in the limbic brain (the emotional center). Advertisers know that creating a positive emotional response to their product results in sales. This is why so many beer commercials show average guys getting the super hot, scantily clad, sexually available, wildly horny stripper models. Advertisers, knowing we live in a shame-based culture, target their marketing to appeal to our longings. They feed our sense of inadequacy and try to convince us that we can be worthy and special if we purchase their product. It’s a seductive quick fix that encourages us to avoid deeper issues. This is the same reason people flock to get-rich-quick seminars.

But when we make a choice from a mood of scarcity, we generate more scarcity. It’s become clear to me that the choices we make from a mood of scarcity and what we imagine we want are not actually aligned with our deeper, truer desires—what I call our soul’s desires. Therefore, even if we manifest something substantial in our lives we will likely still feel unfulfilled. Perhaps this is why, despite Americans having more material wealth than ever before in history, most of us report being less happy. In order to manifest in a way that is both sustainable and truly satisfying, we must learn to shift our emotion and mood space to end the habits of scarcity. Fortunately, we can use our wants as a key to unlocking the mystery of our soul’s desires.

My 3 Keys process is designed to put you in touch with your soul’s desire. You can receive a FREE copy of it when you sign up for the Sacred Odyssey newsletter. Simply scroll to the top right side of almost any page on the website to find the newsletter registration.  I’m confident that if you practice these 3 Keys you will experience a richer life, manifest more powerfully and experience more joy in what you do manifest. I have used these keys with great success in my own life as well as in my coaching practice and my Intimacy with Money program. Give it a try, and explore a deeper and more conscious way that the Law of Attraction can indeed enrich your life!

Blessings,

Tom Lietaert