The Courage to Be Rich

Wednesday, June 25th 2008 by Shanel Yang         Email this article to a friend

Photo by Divs Sejpal

Suze Orman’s dad was a chicken plucker. I had to stop, rewind, and replay that part of her DVD The Courage To Be Rich: Creating a Life of Material and Spiritual Abundance.

Especially since I thought she said chicken-something-else-that-ends- with-”ucker.” (I’d never heard of a chicken plucker!) I turned to my boyfriend and asked, “Did she just say … ?” Then, before I had a chance to stop the DVD and rewind it, Suze paused for dramatic effect before her studio audience, looked seriously at them, then said slowly while nodding her head, “Yep. It’s true. I was so ashamed.” I said out loud, “No way!”

It turned out her shame was not due to anything more serious than her father plucking chicken feathers for a living—especially when he had finished nearly three years of law school but had to quit, along with all his friends, when they ran out of money. All his friends eventually went back, but he didn’t. Why? Because, he stopped believing that he could ever be a lawyer. Instead, he began to say, “I guess that’s just the way things were meant to be.” And, so it was for him.

Suze Orman is one of my heroes because she started with next to nothing (living in a van till she got a job as a waitress, where she worked for 7 years before she took all her savings plus a loan from a friend and lost it all in the stock market!) to 6-time bestselling author, personal finance guru and TV personality, and being named this year by TIME as one of the most influential persons in the world!

I highly recommend her TV show “The Suze Orman Show” on CNBC, especially her segment called “Can I Afford it?” Callers who want to know if they can afford something (usually some luxury item) based on their current financial situation, ask what she thinks. Back in the days when I still had cable TV and was also still tempted to buy expensive things once in a while (see “The Pros and Cons of TV” and “How I Paid of $50,000 of Debt in One Year“), Suze’s advice was always the wake up call that I needed to keep me on the straight and narrow. I imagined what she’d say to me if I called and asked her if I could afford something I wanted. Invariably, I knew she would say, “Have you lost your mind? What are you thinking? You simply can’t afford it!” That’s the kind of tough love that worked for me—because she was absolutely right: I just couldn’t afford it. It really was as simple as that. But, I needed to hear it, week after week, like an AA meeting.

Imagine my joy when I found out that she had made a DVD in 1999 that I could rent from Netflix! I immediately bumped all the other movies from my queue and put this one at the top of my list. Here is my review of this totally worthwhile personal finance primer on some very basic—yet still widely misunderstood—money issues.

THE COURAGE TO BE RICH

“What does courage have to do with being rich?” she asks. “And, what does it mean to be rich anyway?” Whatever riches mean to you (whether that’s merely freedom from financial worries or enough wealth to make your wildest dreams come true), she explains, “It takes courage to turn towards our money rather than away from it.” In her DVD, she presents many good solutions to common money problems; but, it’s up to us to use the tools she’s provided to move towards the money that could be ours if we could only muster enough courage to go through with it.

It means not taking the path of least resistance of doing absolutely nothing differently after watching her DVD, which, of course, guarantees that absolutely nothing in our lives will change—except that we are likely to run into more money problems down the road. It takes real courage to change a lifetime of thinking like a poor person and of bad habits. It takes courage to try and fail and yet always try again. Finally, it takes tremendous courage to take responsibility for our future.

A. YOUR THOUGHTS CREATE YOUR DESTINY

She asks, “Why do some people have more money than others?” A tiny few inherit it. Another tiny few win the lottery or get huge sums from a lawsuit. But, what about the rest? Most millionaires in America are self-made and for the most part had the same opportunities as you or me. So, why did they get rich and not us?

The biggest difference between people who have a lot of money and people who don’t is how we think and feel about money—both about ours and about other people’s. This is the magical secret that determines how much we ultimately get to have and keep because our thoughts and feelings create our destiny. Be very, very careful of what you think. Because what you think you will eventually say. Be very careful what you say because what you say you will eventually do. Be very careful what you do because our actions become our habits. Be careful what you let become your habits because our habits will eventually become our destiny.

When her father gave up on his dream to become a lawyer and announced to himself and the world, “I guess it was just not meant to be,” he let his rich thoughts turn into thoughts of poverty. Anytime you say to yourself, “I can’t,” you are creating your destiny. What do you think about your money? Do you think you will ever get out of debt? Do you think you will ever own your own home? How about: Do you ever think you’ll have enough money for retirement? Whatever you truly believe about these things, do you want those thoughts to come true? If not, then change your thoughts immediately. Focus on new thoughts. Change them from, e.g., “I’ll never get out of debt” to “I’ll get out of debt someday soon.”

How our thoughts create our destiny and how they are often the greatest obstacles that keeps us from having more and being more is the first law of money. Change the language of your thoughts from “I can’t” to thoughts of possibilities.

B. PEOPLE FIRST, THEN MONEY, THEN THINGS

Clutter! We all have it. Way too much of it. But, we just can’t seem to part with most of our stuff. Why? Suze introduces this topic by telling the story of her niece. One day, she asked her very young niece, “What are the five most important things in your life?” The little girl gave this some serious thought then suddenly answered, without a shadow of a doubt, “My family, my house, TV, candy, and money!”

Suze was amazed that she came up with exactly five things and so confidently. Then, she asked her another question, “What do you need to get candy?”

She answered, “Money.”

“Hmm. That’s interesting,” Suze commented. “And, what do you need to get a TV?”

“Money.”

“What about a house?”

“Money.”

“What do you need to get a family?”

“Love.”

(Smart kid, huh?) Then, Suze said, “If you need money to get all the other things you want in life besides your family—to buy candy, TV, and a house—shouldn’t you put money closer to the top of your list, right after your family?”

The look of understanding slowly dawned on her niece’s face as she nodded wisely and said, “You know, I think you’re right!” (Ah, sometimes it’s much easier to teach kids than grownups about the most basic, yet most important, lessons in life!)

How did we as a nation end up having so much stuff that we can’t even find anything, yet we have very little money in our bank accounts and portfolios? First, we buy things because we just had to have them. We were sure we can’t possibly live without them—or at least not happily, just knowing that they’re out there in the stores and not in our loving hands. Then, we hoard all our stuff, even long after we stop loving them. Even at the cost of paying for extra storage space to avoid parting with them for good. We tell ourselves, “But, what if I need it someday? I’ll just kick myself if I have to buy another one.” So, our stuff continues to pile up in storage spaces until we no longer know what we have or don’t—and we end up buying more of what we already have anyway! Why in the world do we do this?

We have a profound fear of loss that somehow got attached to our stuff. We equate who we are with all our material possessions, even our junk and clutter! The very thought of getting rid of any of it seems unbearable because, then who would we be? Who, what, why, how, and where would we be without all our stuff?

But, this is a trap. We are not our things. If everything we own was taken away from us and we had nothing, we would not cease to exist! We are not our stuff. We would have plenty, especially if we have the real riches of good relationships (people) and financial security or wealth (money). But, when we chase or cling to material possessions (things) above money or even people, we can never be truly rich. Clutter gets in the way. Many of us have cluttered desks, file cabinets, drawers, cabinets, closets, and garages that prevent us from finding important documents and other truly valuable possessions quickly and easily when we do need them. But, that’s impossible with clutter for two reasons: (1) You either can’t find anything and looking for it is always a huge waste of time; or, (2) You spend huge amounts of time cataloging and storing everything so you can find it relatively quickly and easily, but then you have to keep reviewing and updating your system.

Suze describes helping a couple declutter their home and finding a $600 IRS refund check on the husband’s messy desk that had expired years before and thus could not be cashed and a savings bond inside the wife’s hat box in the closet that she had thought was lost! And, that wasn’t chump change for that couple, either, because they carried a balance of several thousands dollars on their credit cards!

Suze says clutter stands in the way of what we have today and what we can have tomorrow. This reminds me of a Bruce Lee story. A martial arts expert went to him and asked if he would teach him his unique style of martial arts called Jeet Kune Do. He answered that he could teach him, but only if he lets go of everything he had already learned about the other martial arts. He used the analogy of the cup. He explained that he could not fill a cup that is already full, but that he had to first empty the cup of its existing contents before he could fill it with something new. I think this analogy is apt for our stuff, too, especially if we haven’t used the stuff for over a year. Lugging around or storing all our old stuff actually keeps us stuck in our past, and prevents us from being receptive to all that the future has to offer.

She asks that you go through your home and get rid of at least 25 things that are of no use to anyone. The sock or earring that lost its partner years ago. Their partners are not coming back! All the broken stuff that you’re never going to fix. How do you know? You haven’t fixed them yet, right? And, you’ve been doing just fine. What’s the point of hanging onto all this stuff? Just throw it all away.

Then, when you’re done with that, she also asks that you go through all your stuff a second time and find at least 25 things that are of no use to you but might be of use to someone else. The brand new or almost new pasta machine that’s still in the box. The sweater that you just had to have but only wore once. The wardrobe of clothes that you bought two sizes too small to inspire you to lose weight but has already gone out of style, though the price tags are still on them! Take all that stuff and just donate it to your local thrift shop. If you think you could sell them at a garage sale, that’s fine. But, let’s get real. What are the chances of you actually doing that? You’re more likely to just move all your clutter from one place to another. And, even if you do have that garage sale, you’ll just be passing off your clutter to someone else who will be adding it to their clutter collection! Why not give it away to people who really need it and will appreciate it? Because what’s going to happen is when you look at those items that you just had to have at one time and really think about getting rid of it, you’ll start to feel a pain, a palpable pang of regret, that this is just too precious to part with (even though you’ve only used it once), and you’ll want to keep it. But, if you know you’ll be donating it to someone who will love it as you once did, then you’ll not only experience the exhilarating freedom from clutter, you’ll also know the joy of charitable giving.

CONCLUSION

There’s actually a lot more on this excellent DVD, but I’ll save the rest for another post. For now, remember these two important laws of money: (1) Think “rich” thoughts, not thoughts of poverty; and (2) Keep your priorities straight—first people, then money, then things. When it comes to becoming rich in every sense of the word, you can do it if you have the courage to follow these two magical rules!

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