Archive for the ‘Prosperity Quick Tips’ Category

The many changes occurring in our economic foundation require a new focus and discipline for you to thrive and prosper. Here are five keys that I consider essential.

• Pay close attention to your finances. During difficult or transitional times knowing exactly where you stand financially and keeping up-to-date financial records are essential for strategizing and making rational financial decisions.
• Stay tuned to financial news. You will benefit from following stories and commentary about the financial sector and becoming more literate about the financial world. This requires knowing much more than just the movement of the stock market, which is a limited view of financial trends.
• Focus on the present, not the past or future. The future is entirely unknown, and during uncertain times people tend to project into the future from fear. Many people are thriving right now and there’s no reason why you can’t thrive and prosper too if you adjust your financial behavior and goals to fit current conditions.
• Be open to new ideas and opportunities. Holding onto the past often provides apparent safety when in fact it keeps you from moving forward. Have an open mind and carefully examine the potential of opportunities that are presented to you, even if they require moving out of your comfort zone.
• Take care of your physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Eat healthy foods, exercise regularly, connect to others, express yourself authentically, and meditate daily. This is not the time to withdraw and comfort yourself with unhealthy foods and inactivity.

Making changes to your focus and behavior requires ongoing attention and support. The Peace of Mind & Prosperity program can provide this for you. Read more about the program on ProsperityPlace.com.

Resourses: PBS.org and CSPAN have some excellent interviews about events leading up to the financial downturn and suggestions for the future. Highly recommended: (All can be downloaded from ITunes
The Warning: a Frontline program. http://bit.ly/ax6qdP
After Words Interviews on CSPAN’s Book TV
    Joseph Stiglitz: Author of FreeFall
    Naomi Prins: Author of It Takes a Pillage

Last week, I posted a tip to my Facebook fan page suggesting that people take a few minutes each day to do nothing. As I’ve thought about this, I realized that if you’re alive, it’s impossible to do nothing. You are always breathing and usually thinking. And doing nothing is actually doing something.

That led my mind to think about how we really do get to choose our moment to moment activities and point of focus. We can choose to be ultra-busy, highly stressed, in fear, or acting compulsively (eating, drinking, shopping, etc.), or the choice can be to pace ourselves carefully, approach everything in a relaxed manner, trust in a positive outcome, or make deliberate choices.

Some people seem to thrive in high stress situations. When I was younger and working for a nightly network television show, I loved the fast pace and daily pressure, but was taking lots of Valium and eating more than my share of sugar and junk foods. In the long run, it proved to be disastrous physically and emotionally. Read the rest of this entry »

In my book Build Your Money Muscles, I identify the five main feelings that people act out through their finances. One of those is a sense of being trapped. When I wrote the book, I didn’t understand the depths of this feeling and it’s nuances. Lately, that understanding is coming into focus. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Children often are discouraged from truely expressing themselves because their parents, and others, just don’t get who they are. I can remember my mother’s reaction when, as a three-year old dressed in my favorite yellow sunsuit, I proudly presented myself as a black bear, having covered myself with mud. I learned then, and in many instances afterwards, that it isn’t always safe to let people now who I am.

Perhaps you can remember moments when you realized that speaking or acting freely could lead to punishment or stimulate negative reactions from those around you. As a result, you developed coping mechanisms that allowed you to fit it or be acceptable.

The result: being trapped in a persona that works in the world, but leaves you feeling disconnected and, perhaps empty. This is often accompanied by less-than feelings, shame, and lots of negative self-talk.

Not the best foundation for drawing in a free-flow of love and support — financial and otherwise.

Read the rest of this entry »

With everything that is going on in the world, it sometimes feels to me as if the world is falling apart. The news stories often contain phrases such as “the biggest,” “the worst since,” and “never seen before.”

Yet despite what is going on in the world, each of us has to continue performing our day-to-day tasks for our business ventures or jobs. Few of us can just sit back and wait for it all to pass, especially since it would seem that it’s not going to pass.

Uncertainty prevails.

There are times when I just want to surf the Net, go for a nice long walk, or even hide under the covers. On some days, I find it hard to focus on the task at hand.

Read the rest of this entry »

Each day, new data is released in the United States that deepens the gloom and doom surrounding the current “economic recovery.” In the past week we have learned:

• Job openings are at a record low — there are 50% fewer than in 2007
• More homeowners are struggling as option ARMs reset higher
• Approximately one-third of all mortgage holders have a loan balance that’s higher than the current value of their home
• Cities and states are still struggling to find ways to balance their budgets
• People are using far less credit and are saving more, which is great for them, but slows the economy which depends on consumer spending
• Although the unemployment rate is 10%, the number of people who are either unemployed, underemployed, or have given up looking reaches more than 17% of the working-age population
• Qualified people who are finding work are often accepting lower salaries than they earned before they were laid off. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Tap into the energy of a new year and new decade to move yourself rapidly in a positive direction by making small, easily-doable changes — starting today!

If you want to alter your financial position, then you must make changes in the way you think, feel, and behave. To avoid resitance to change, rather than focus on important parts of your life, make small, seemingly-insignificant changes and you can begin to shift your position in life.

The idea is to adapt your system to change while minimizing the disorientation that comes with change. It is this disorientation that stimulates resistance or backsliding.

Here are some suggestions: Read the rest of this entry »

I wish you all the best in 2010. And to help insure that you experience a healthy financial year, here’s what I suggest:

• Without delay, set up a system for keeping careful financial records. Use software such as Quicken, Quickbooks for your business, one of the many apps available for the IPhone or ITouch, or one of the online services such as mint.com. If you deal with multiple currencies, try AceMoney
• If you already keep good records, analyse the data. Determine your best source(s) of income, your highest expenses, and how your monthly income in 2009 compared to your monthly income in 2008. Be aware of changes in your sources of income and expenses. Read the rest of this entry »

A recent article in Fortune magazine http://bit.ly/6AXo0R indicated that there are fewer deaths during a recession because people apparently “adopt smarter lifestyles in recessions, especially those people with the worst health habits.”

One reason is that as work hours are cut back or people are laid off, they have more time to spend going to the gym, preparing meals, and getting more sleep.

There’s something else happening too. People are becoming much more conscious about how they spend their money. Consumer sales are decreasing because many are deciding against excess and for frugality. Instead of thinking, “It’s only $20!” and making an unnecessary purchase, often the decision is to not spend the $20 and save it instead. That’s good for a person’s economic health. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the season when the “I-have-to-have-it-now” syndrome often appears. Symptoms include hyperactivity, overspending, excessive debting, and lots of shopping, often for unneeded items.

Seeing something you like and putting off the purchase is more difficult now when every message from the media is buy, buy, buy. After all, we are told, we help the economy by being consumers.

Yet this is the perfect time to learn how to wait, a skill that eludes most people in this culture that encourages instant gratification. Learning to wait actually increases your chances of manifesting what you want without overspending or debting. In the case of non-consumer goods or events, learning to wait can increase your general comfort level in life. Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to thrive in this economic environment and prepare for a prosperous 2010, it’s time to pay attention to your finances and create a strategy for the new year. Even if you already keep good records, you can learn to go even deeper into what you can learn from your own numbers so you can get the most value from your money.

I hope that if you suffer from any level of Financial Vagueness Syndrome, you will decide that this is the time to hunker down and get real about your finances. One thing is for certain: Money doesn’t take care of itself. Without care, it’s like a wild child that needs to be tamed.

I’ll have to admit that I avoid talking about this because I know that people would rather have a magic bullet that fixes something and makes their money fine. But without money management, you limit your own prosperity.

Here’s what I suggest: Read the rest of this entry »