Lazy Man and Money

Five Causes of Overspending

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We’re still in the summer hole where the kids are out of school, but camp hasn’t started. My wife is still working and finishing up the finals on her last class in her pharmaceutical regulation MBA*. She’s spending dozens of hours running a raffle fundraiser for the state’s pharmacists**.

For the last couple of days, it has just been me and the boys. The good news is that we’ve been able to spend some real quality time together. We’ve gone to the beach. We started a pizza company.

One thing that I haven’t done? Thinking or writing about money (other than our virtual pizza customers). That’s a good thing, like the next evolution of money is not worrying about it much.

Today, I wanted to dig into old notes that I had from a online chat with a friend. Again, since I haven’t thought about this much, it may be best to get the ball rolling and have a community effort filling more ideas in the comments.

Because the conversation with the friend was so long ago, I don’t remember the background or context, and my notes are shoddy to say the least. The gyst of the conversation was that there are five reasons why people overspend. (There may be more, but these are the ones that we identified.)

1. Keeping up with the Jones

My friend is excellent at reigning in his spending on “stuff.” I’m just very good. I have a weakness for children’s STEM toys (as you can tell from above). I don’t feel the need to have the biggest house or nicest car. In fact, with the amount of dogs, kids, and beach my car goes through, it’s not worth having a nice car.

Personally, this can be a bit of a trap because our kids go to a private school where most of the people are wealthy. The average “Jones” there has a lot of money to flaunt.

2. Advertising

Robert Palmer sang it best, “you like to think that you’re immune to the stuff, oh yeah.” Yes, I do like to think that advertising doesn’t effect me. I’m pretty analytical with my purchases and planning. However, it would be foolish for me to pretend that I am immune to it.

3. YOLO Mentality

I used to laugh at the Yolo Only Live Once (YOLO) Mentality. It can almost be literally used to justify any action. At the same time, there’s a kernel of truth to that idea.

In fact, in the past we used to say, “You can’t take it with you”, meaning that money isn’t going to do you a lot of good when you die. I personally have a lot of trouble of with this balance. I almost always go with the option that involves not spending money. However, there are a few times when I missed out some really great experiences. For example, Weezer went on a short tour playing only stuff from the blue album and Pinkerton (my favorites) and I cheaped out.

4. Self-Licensing

Self-Licensing is a little like the YOLO mentality above. However, in this case you aren’t spending because “you only live once.” Instead, you are spending because “you deserve it.” For example, you might impress the boss with a great presentation, to celebrate you go out and spend $50 in drinks at a bar.

I’ve been doing a little self-licensing myself lately. When I get through a tough day and it more or less went okay, I’ve been having a Chipwich knock-off ice cream sandwich from Aldi. It’s not very expensive (about $0.75 each), but it isn’t healthy at over 300 calories.

5. Convenience

Spending for convenience may be one of the reasons we can relate to most. Have a tough day and don’t want to make dinner? There’s a Chipotle app for that. Don’t feel like making your own coffee in the morning? There’s a place for that as well.

My big convenience spending comes in home maintenance. I don’t like to do yard work and I’m not very handy with a lot of other stuff. Fortunately, I find it relatively convenient to make some slow cooker meals that can save us from going to restaurants.

Final Thoughts

What are your overspending urges? Can you find any new categories that I missed? Let me know in the comments.

* I think it’s notable that we’ve made healthcare so complicated in the US, that pharmacists like my wife are pushed to get an advanced degree on what seems to amount to man-made political problems. This isn’t my area of expertise and maybe all other countries have this issue.

** You’d think that selling raffle tickets wouldn’t be time consuming. Coordinating the paper trail of people selling (and losing) paper tickets is a mess. I thought that an online system would be easier, but it currently goes against Rhode Island law.

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College Costs: What We Owe Each Other

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I read a very thought-provoking article the other day from Early Retirement Dude: I don’t think we owe college to our kids. Does that make me a bad father?.

(Hat tip to Justin of Root of Good for sharing it on Twitter.)

I mostly agree with the title (more on this later), so I jumped into the article. You can click the link above and open it in a new window, because I’m probably going to be quoting some stuff.

It starts off powerfully and I think almost anyone would agree:

It’s not that you owe your kid a fashionable coat… it’s that you owe her a warm one… Anything beyond that’s a choice, not an obligation.

This is a cool illustration of needs vs. wants. This is an interesting discussion when put into the context of college. I usually think of this in terms of: My children may want to go to a small expensive liberal arts college, but their college needs may be met by our current state school (University of Rhode Island currently.)

The idea college isn’t a need is today’s world is something I hadn’t considered. I feel like a college degree nowadays was like a high school diploma of the generation before me. It’s hard to really say what a need is when it comes to education, but I think it’s best to have all the options open. Not having a college degree closes a lot of doors.

A few sentences later this hit me hard:

You don’t owe your kid college… you owe her a good start in life. Assuming the two are the same thing might be more harmful than helpful to both of you.

Doh! I had considered the two the same. My next thought is that this thought is going to be hurting my children. Fortunately they are 5 and 6, so I’ve got about a decade to think about this and solve the problem. (Of course, it will be here in a blink of an eye like the first 5 years.)

I don’t see where this harm would come from in most cases as long as people make reasonable choices.

Nonetheless, I’m excited to read the rest of the article, because Early Retirement Dude is going to give his ideas on what a “good start” is. I feel like my view is very basic, so I’m looking forward to seeing a new viewpoint.

We move on to the next section:

“A successful career isn’t the same as a successful life… We’ve all heard about the guy who’s miserable in a high-paying job.”

I think a successful career should be part a successful life. Who wants to feel unsuccessful roughly half of his/her waking life? That doesn’t necessarily mean that success is determined by a high-paying career. It could mean that you found fulfilling work. And finding that fulfilling work is probably easier when you have the option to do things that you want to do… and maybe change your mind as you go along.

I believe that a college degree helps with that.

It’s only been one generation since college became perceived as the gateway to success.

What’s been diminished, then, is the idea that the gateway to a ‘better life’ is ability and not pedigree. When hiring a candidate for a sales position, would you rather find a recent college grad with a degree in sales, or a candidate with a ten-year track record but no college on his resume?

This section changed my view of where the article was going. I just don’t buy these kinds of arguments. For example, it’s only been one generation since we felt the need to have internet access. A lot can happen in a generation with how fast news, information, and people can travel now. What happened in a previous generation might not relevant in the next one.

I think society has changed and we have to adapt to it. While society may need to rethink the value of a degree vs. experience, we can’t gamble our loved one’s future on society doing so. It seems that the vast majority of people are getting degrees and that sales position is going to have someone with the same or more experience AND the degree.

Sending your kids to college requires them to submit themselves to unreasonable strictures imposed on them by the university system.

I’m not sure that all colleges have the unreasonable strictures imposed on them. Some are pretty liberal. However, I’d say that every public high school and a lot of careers have these as well. It sounds a little unfair to single out college for this.

Not all kids can handle college

This is true. However, if this is the case then the question of whether you owe college to the child is trivial. Do you owe a two year old a family heirloom hunting knife? No.

If you’re carrying credit card debt or any other debt above student loan rates, paying tuition is a terrible economic inefficiency.

This is very true as well. In this case, I’d say that if you can’t afford to pay for college, you don’t owe it. I hope there aren’t too many people running up credit card debt to pay for their kid’s tuition.

Many of us will have to balance taking care of our kids against taking care of our parents.

This is a good point, but again covered by if you can’t afford to pay for college, you don’t owe it.

To wit: if you pay for your kid’s college you can forget about ever retiring yourself.

It is possible to pay for your children’s college and retire yourself. People have done it. Seriously.

It’s usually well-settled personal finance that you pay for your retirement first. As the saying goes, “You can’t get loans for retirement.” (Well maybe a reverse mortgage.)

In the end, all these last three financial situations are particular on your personal situation. Early Retirement Dude supports his points with a lot of good data about the average person in the situation. The good thing is the average may not relevant in your situation. Early Retirement Dude himself points out that he doesn’t have to take financial care of his parents.

The good thing is that you aren’t a statistic. Also, chances are, that if you are reading this, you are probably doing better financially than most.

So… College: What We Owe Each Other

With the background information covered, we can move forward.

The first thing I learned is that the question of whether a parent owes college is only relevant if:

  1. College is the right option for your child
  2. College can be afforded

The first one requires a subjective personal assessment of your situation. I can’t help you with that.

The second one is a complex personal finance question. It could be a good one to work on with your financial planner. That planner may be able to suggest a certain range of money you could afford for college. That could help pin down the college options that are a good fit.

If college is the right option and it can be afforded, I think we finally get to the philosophical question:

What do you as a parent owe your child when it comes to college?

When I was going to college, our family fortunately dodged this discussion by getting a full scholarship to an excellent school. I suspect there would have been an option of getting some help from my mother (my father had died a few years before), if I went to a public school. It could have been more, perhaps even 100% of a private school, but I want to say that this was a minimum expectation from me.

I’ve put a lot of thought about this question when it comes to our own kids, ages 5 and 6. However, my wife’s GI Bill may cover half of their college expenses if they choose to go to an in-state public college. For other colleges, it is a set amount of money per year. It’s a tremendous benefit. In a lot of ways, it could “take us off the hook” for what we owe our children.

That’s not to say that we haven’t saved some money in 529 plans. It’s just not going to be very much in comparison to what the financial planners tell you to save. If we don’t add to it, maybe it will pay for one more year for one child. That would cover 5 of the 8 years of school between the two children. We may also be able to save more, but we are investing it now in private school. (We qualify for a great scholarship.)

Hopefully there’s an educational snowball. My (completely based on nothing scientific) feeling is that if you get children started well early on, it will pay dividends down the line.

So what about the other three years? That’s where they are going to have to pick up the slack. Hopefully they’ll get scholarships. Perhaps they’ll get loans. Perhaps they’ll work. That’s what they owe us when it comes to college… having some skin in the game and doing the best they can.

In any case, I think there’s an expectation to have a clear, financial conversation about college. I’m not sure when those kind of conversations start, but I think I’ll drop dad hints for quite a bit, so they’ll have expectation.

Again, these are very early thoughts. My thoughts are likely to evolve over the next 10 years as we approach blastoff.

What are your thoughts about what we owe to each other when it comes to college expenses? Let me know in the comments.

P.S. The title “What We Owe to Each Other” is taken from The Good Place, which was taken from the real book.

How To Be Successful in the New Year

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Welcome to 2018!

It still feels like 2017 to me. The kids are still on their winter break from school. Tomorrow, I get focus on writing again. It feels like forever, and I’m so excited to get started. In the meantime, I’m going to continue a 9-year tradition… bumping up one of my most popular articles.

How To Be Successful In The New Year
How To Be Successful In The New Year

Start at the Beginning

I’m very biased here, but my more recent blog Be Better Now focuses more on success and self-improvement. It covers important topic from How to Make and Keep Your New Year’s Resolution to this Quick Guide to Success.

If you only read and followed through on those two general articles, I can almost guarantee you’d have the best year of your life (short of an unrelated tragedy).

However, let’s continue on:

Preparation and Planning

  • Make a List of Short, Medium, and Long Term Goals – Each night before I go to sleep, I try to write down 3-5 things that I want to accomplish the next day. I make sure that at least a couple are things that I can complete that day and purge from my to-do list. I also make sure to add a couple of small parts of medium or long-term projects.

    Here’s an example: Imagine that you want to write an eBook. The first day you create a rough outline of the book – just the chapters. The next day you might want to pick 3 or 4 things in a few chapters to cover in each chapter. Repeat this for 3 or 4 days and you’ll have a great plan for a whole 9-12 chapter book in less than a week. Then you simply need to spend a day expanding each chapter. In about 20 days you’ll have completed the first draft. Use the next 10 days (or more) to review, revise, and edit.

  • Catalog Your Progress – I started this blog to keep me accountable. I can’t go out and buy a Ferrari on credit. If I did, I’d have to write about it here. I have a strong streak of not buying a Ferrari on credit. See? Simple, right?

Fix Your Finances

This is important enough that I created a whole article focusing on it. Unfortunately, the article is quite out of date. Still the ideas are sound. Still there should be a half dozen easy ways for many people to save thousands of dollars.

Learn These Skills

  • Sales / Marketing – Even if you don’t think you have a product to sell, you do… yourself. I’ve learned that sales and marketing are not easy skills to learn. You can’t shout “look at me!” or people will think you are obnoxious. You have to find people who might be genuinely interested in what you have to offer. I always find it best to be open and honest with what I have to sell. If the product is of value, you price it accordingly, and have the right buyer, it should sell itself. I’ve found that if you have to “sell” too hard, it’s probably going to be a sale you regret making.
  • Public Speaking – I am most shy person on Earth. Talking to someone one-on-one often ties my stomach in knots. I’ve almost completely given up using the phone. Imagine how I feel about public speaking right now. There’s at least a 90% chance I’d faint.

    However, public speaking was a required class in high school. I started off horrible, but by the end, I had earned an A. The head cheerleader said that I was funny… which is the kind of thing that sticks with you 25 years later (Thanks Amy!) I have to remember that public speaking really is a skill where practice means everything. An organization such as Toastmasters, seems to be the best way to get that practice. Unfortunately, Toastmasters usually takes a back seat to the pile of other things that I’m currently focusing on.

  • Writing – Even if you are crafting a short e-mail, try to use proper grammar. You’d be surprised how many e-mails I receive where people make 6 mistakes in 6 sentences. Poor writing skills on the first impression impacts my view of the person’s intelligence and/or professionalism. Perhaps it shouldn’t be that way, but it is. A person who can write great commands my respect and my trust.

    I realize that my articles have more than their fair share of writing mistakes. This article probably has 3-5 in it. I feel that it is a balance. I’d rather spend my time writing another article than proofreading the previous one for a couple of typos.

  • Networking – Get out there and meet new people in your areas of interest. When you know a lot of people, opportunities multiply. [Editor’s Note, I’m going to date myself on this, but I wrote this about Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income who wasn’t widely known in January of 2009 when I wrote this article:

    “To go back to the eBook example above, I met one person who has had some success with an eBook. He’s in the process of getting it translated into an audio book now. He could definitely be a great resource for me to learn from. He’s newer to blogging and doesn’t have the number of readers that I have. I can probably give him a few tips and help him out. Now if I knew 100 people like this guy, I’d have a solution to almost every question I’d ever have at my fingertips.”

  • Read More and Faster – I have always been a very slow reader. I simply don’t scan text very well. Perhaps I’m afraid I’ll miss a critical word or something silly like that. This is one area that I’m going to work on in the new year. Much of my time is spent reading, you’d think I’d at least be good at it.

Take Action

  • Help Someone with Something Everyday – This may sound like some kind of “Pay It Forward” hype. In some ways it is. I estimate that I’ve given guidance to around 50 or 100 bloggers who are just getting going that were looking for advice. Some of them became successful bloggers and some stopped blogging. The successful ones have returned the favor 100 times over or more. They link to my articles, they comment on my site, and fill me in with opportunities that I would have otherwise missed. This isn’t limited to blogging. If you mentor someone, you’ll be seen as a natural leader. I’ve always seen a strong correlation between leadership and success.
  • Make Mistakes – When I just got out of college, I took a job with a top ten Internet company. It was a very high profile job as I managed the search engine myself. It was about 20% of this 2 billion dollar company’s traffic… and some of their most valuable real estate (look what Google did with search). The thought that I’d make a mistake scared me to death. I spent each day walking on eggshells until the day that I made a mistake. It was a terrible mistake that crashed the whole database. A strange thing happened. No one got upset with me, and we were able to recover pretty quickly. From that experience, I learned to always have a back-up plan. This allowed me to take some risks, experiment more, and eventually produce ideas that made the company tens of millions of dollars. Perhaps as importantly, I learned to tolerate other people’s mistakes.
  • Surround Yourself with Like-Minded Individuals – There are studies that show an individual’s income will be somewhere around the average of your closest five friends. That formula works for me and my closest friends – or it did until I decided to build my career from websites. There are also studies that show your weight will reflect those who you hang around with. It makes sense if you think about it. If your circle of friends likes to bounce business ideas off each other while playing a game of pickup basketball, you’ll probably put yourself closer to the path of prosperity than if you tell fart jokes while eating Bon-Bons.
  • Exercise – Whenever I work out, I am all pumped up with endorphins for hours. It feels like nothing can stop me – as if I could tackle a bear. Instead of tackling a bear, I focus that energy on my list of goals and churn through it like never before.
  • Start a Website or Blog – It’s easy to talk the talk, but what matters is if you can walk the walk. A website or blog not only makes you accountable for the goals that you set, but can also help you network and gather useful information. For more inspiration read how personal finance blogging helped me.

Be More Productive

  • Don’t Get Wrapped Up in Television – I love television. However, I try to watch shows that you don’t have to follow too closely. This way I can work while it’s on. You won’t see me watching a lot of Law and Order because it requires too much of my focus. However, having the Red Sox on the background doesn’t distract me from accomplishing what I’m trying to.
  • Commute with Books on Tape (or Podcasts) – Most of the people I know have a 30-60 minute commute to work each day. You can listen to some morning talk show or a shock-jock DJ or you can learn some of the skills that I mention above. I’m not saying that you should throw away all entertainment, but if you are looking to increase your productivity, utilizing this downtime is a great start.
  • Declutter and Organize Your Home and Work Area – I used to waste a lot of time looking for stuff. The problem? I had stuff everywhere. I couldn’t find the stuff that I needed from the old stuff that was piled around it. It’s amazed me the number of things that I had around the home that I didn’t use. Finally I simply said “Stuff It!” and got rid of most of the stuff that I didn’t use and put other special stuff in a closet that I’ll probably ignore for another years. Just like in What About Bob, “baby steps…” I tell myself.

Think Your Way To Success

  • Think Positively – I’m not going to get Stuart Smalley, Motivational Speaker on you, but making the conscious decision to focus on being financially successful is extremely helpful. Bringing finances to front of my mind, instead of the back has made a huge difference in my finances.
  • Don’t Hate Money – Lose the thinking that money is the root of all evil. Start thinking about it as a key to freedom to do whatever interests you. Think of it as a way to help friends, family, and charities important to you. Think about how you could use money to make the world a better place.
  • Appreciate What You Have – Schedule a day to just appreciate yourself. Appreciate the things that you do have. The fact that you are reading this likely means that you are much better off than others in the world.
  • Be In A Good Mood – One of my favorite lines from Say Anything is when Lloyd Dobler (played by John Cusack) says to his sister, “Why can’t you be in a good mood? How hard is it to decide to be in a good mood and be in a good mood once in a while?”

The Most Important Key to Success…

  • Do What You Love – You aren’t going to be successful at something you spend all day dreading. When I was excited about software engineering, I was good – perhaps even above average ;-). When I got stuck on a project that didn’t interest me, I was honestly a poor software engineer.

    However, be careful about blinding heeding the “follow your passion” advice. You must also recognize supply and demand and work within those constraints. There’s a large supply of people who want to become professional baseball or basketball players, and the demand is for only a few hundred. This means you have to be so much better than everyone else. There are few people looking to be morticians because it creeps a lot of people out, but there is a big demand, leading to a high-paying lucrative career.

    Mark Cuban has a great article on a related to this: Don’t Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort.

Understand the Psychology of Spending and Overcome it

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The following is a guest post by Tina Roth. She advises about developing positive habits to help you live a rich and financial secure life. Her finance blog was created to inspire people to explore more on frugal living and especially, to help you craft a financial secure life.

Earlier, mistakes were just mistakes. But after the discovery of the subconscious mind, some mistakes came to know as Freudian slips. We commit those mistakes because the subconscious mind compels us, and the conscious mind couldn’t recognize the compulsion.

Psychoanalysts believe such compulsions are behind habits. Many habits including the habit of spending are the results of psychological impulses. The era of globalization has taught us to identify ourselves as consumers, so impulsive spending appears justified.

Habitual spending

But spending out of impulse is financially disastrous. In this article, I discuss the psychological factors that trigger spending, and how to make peace with them.

Imaginary competition

We feel we need to compete with others when we don’t. Imagine your neighbor has bought a Land Rover recently. When you see him driving his new car, a subconscious impulse of competition will kick in. You’ll probably end up buying the latest model of Chrysler.

Big brands are responsible for this. Through advertisement, they create this false sense of competition, so their products get sold. And we end up buying stuff that we either don’t necessarily need or already have the inexpensive replacement. If you could resist advertisement, and ignore others, who show off, your personal finance will stay safe.

Discount offers

It’s a sales hack that forces someone to buy. Behavioral psychologists hold when we see sales pitches like “Save 60%” or “Offered at 50% Discount”, the psychological impulse to buy the so called discounted product triggers. The product that you are buying may not be coming with a discount at all.

How can you get over this impulse?

You need to keep two things in mind. Firstly, the discount may be fake. If a retailer is selling something to you at a price of $200 and claiming to offer you a 50% discount, then the original price of the item is $400. Are other retailers selling the same item at $400? If not, then it was a phony discount only to lure you. Besides, Getting a product at a discounted rate doesn’t mean you are getting it free. You are still spending money. Is the item worth spending buying?

Spending out of boredom

You might find it hard to believe, but it’s true. A lot of people spend money because they are too bored to do other things. This segment of consumers mostly includes females. As a matter of fact, some psychotherapeutic techniques use shopping to alleviate stress.

The best way to overcome spending out of boredom is to do something else instead of shopping when bored or stressed out. Watch movies on Netflix, play with your kids, listen to music. Spending money when you are bored may give you a pleasant experience, but hurts your finances.

Credit cards

Some people attempt to justify spending saying it’s an investment. But that’s always true. One example such example is having an extra credit card.

Some might argue that having more credit cards help to increase the credit score. Well, that’s only partially true. Having more than one card doesn’t increase the score alone. The cardholder needs to keep the credit utilization ratio low, which is possible only if he spends only 10% of the credit limit.

Very few people keep their cards under-utilized, rather they spend money lavishly, which increases their debts and hurt their finances.

Instant gains

A survey was done by a group of psychologists. They gave the surveyees two choices. The surveyees could either receive $50 instantly or wait for a year and then receive $200. Most surveyees went with the former option. This has made the surveyors conclude instant gratification is a basic tendency.

Putting a leash on the desires for instant gains is necessary. Or else, one would spend money for frivolous purposes and ignore serious ones. For example, investing in health insurance or life insurance can bring substantial gains in the foreseeable future. But due to the urge for instant gratification, one might spend the money for a trivial purpose.

Budgeting skills

Budgeting may appear like an uncomplicated and simple task, but it can be daunting at times, especially if you don’t know how to budget. Budgeting can make you a prudent and frugal person, who knows his finances, and spend only when it’s necessary to spend.

Shopaholics are known to overspend. The majority of them are either in their 20s or 30s. This is the time in one’s life when he should learn to manage and understand money. Budgeting skills help you to manage your money better. As you create two tabs, one for earning and another for spending, you get to see from which areas, money is coming and how it is flowing out.

You’ll eventually want to stop the outflow and increase the inflow. This drive will replace the urge to spend and turn you into a saver from a spender. Budgeting in your 30s and 40s is very important because this is the time when people earn, try to save and fail.

What do you think of the article? Do you understand the psychology behind spending? Would you follow the tips given here to overcome impulse spending?

Friends’ Influence and Money: A Two Way Street

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I often write a lot of words on saving money. Cut out this expensive item… consider substituting this other item… Sometimes I write about making more money. However, I very rarely go into the psychology behind making and spending money. Today, I’m going to venture into those waters… and hopefully avoid drowning.

I first read in Larry Winget’s book, You’re Broke Because You Want to Be, your income is typically the average of your five closest friends. Though Winget gives credit to Jim Rohn, the concept pans out when I look at my life (at least as long as I’m not only a full-time blogger). Winget makes a great point that he tries to surround himself with wealthy people.

Surrounding yourself with wealthy people is a solid idea, but it’s not like you can just make friends with folks who can afford to shop at 5th Avenue or Rodeo Drive overnight. I met most of my high-income friends in an expensive, private top 30 university. They had typically had fairly wealthy parents and went on to high paying jobs after school. Winget/Rohn seem to approach it as a egg – surrounding yourself with high-income people will help you get rich. I approach it like a chicken – I’m surrounded by high-income earners for the same reasons that they earned a high income.

There’s another side of coin that Larry doesn’t discuss in his book (at least that I recall). I have a theory that your spending is the average of your five closest friends. This is a completely untested theory – it seems logical to me and consistent in my own life. Why is it logical? Well my wife still thinks that I have a plasma television because “all your friends got them.” She doesn’t seem to factor in that me and all my friends love technology. My wife also expects me to get a high-end SLR digital camera soon – simply because my other friends have them. That’s an exception to the rule… I’m not looking to carrying around a murse (man-purse) full of lenses.

So if your income is the average of your five closest friends and your spending may be the average of your five closest friends, do you really have any control of your life? As always, I think the answer is yes – if you recognize these subconscious principles at work and make your conscious deal with them.

What about you? Is your income the average of your five closest friends? Do you feel that your income is the result of associating with those friends, or is it just “birds of a feather flock together?” Do you find your spending is the average of your five closest friends?