I listened to a nice and inspiring story about money value from a local radio channel today. I would like to share it over here:

Long long time ago, there was a rich businessman living in an old town. He exchanged all his assets and money for golds the time he retired. He buried all the golds under a tree. Everyday, this rich man dig out from the soil, count the gold and buries them again under the tree. He is happy to find that all his golds are there every day.

But his habit was discovered by a thief. One night, this thief dug out all the golds and ran away with them. This rich man was sad and cried in front of the tree when all his golds had gone. At this time, a monk passed by. After understand the whole story, this monk took up a few stones and gave to the rich man. The rich man was shocked.

The monk explained and said:” Your money is like a stone because you buried them and never fully utilized its value”.

That is the end of the story. Do you learn something from it?

We all know that money is a figure in our account or just a piece of paper in our wallet. Before this I read a book saying that money just a piece of paper that doesn’t have any big value on it. However, it has the power to exchange goods. This is the real “value” of money. Therefore money is just piece of paper before you really use it to exchange for something.

I have a few friends who are good in money management. They spend money wisely and they have their own budget. What they are focusing is saving more money. They don’t active in any other charity activities or help people. They just ignore them by saying that they don’t have enough money to do so. They said so because they want to save more money!

But I have a question for them: how much they want to save? Hundred thousands? 1 million? or 1 billion? They never have the answer for me! In fact, they will never have the answer. The time you save one hundred thousands, you will think that you can save 1 million. The time you hit it, you will say there are people who has hundreds of million inside their bank accounts. So you decide to follow and keep saving. This is a small little rat race. Can you see this?

Saving is a good habit that we must learn. But if saving too much without a purpose or goal, then you are just saving a pile of papers in bank. Money will always be a paper unless you spend it on something that has value.

I’m on my way to achieve financial freedom. Saving is very important for me but it never becomes a lifetime goal for me. For me, there are a few purposes saving money for:

1. Save for the emergency
2. Save for the investment
3. Save for children college or education fund

So all I have to do is set a goal for each purpose. For example, I have a goal to save $50,000 for my investment plan. So once I save this amount of money, I will release the power of my money and will never save again except I lost all my $50K. I will spend my money in something that is more meaningful than putting it in a bank. For example, donating to charity, helping other people, travel around with family and etc. I believe that our life is not all about money and saving money. We should unlock and break this barrier to enjoy the life that we want to. But please remember, the foundation is you must be financial secure or free. You must solve all your money problems before you can do this.

Please remember, saving is good for you and your family. You must do this first in your financial planning especially you have the common financial problems that most people have. At least you must save up the money for emergency purpose or I usually call financial security. In this article, I just want to show you that over-saving is not good. Anyway anything that is good will become bad if it is over the limit.

So start saving today but never bury the power of your money. There are a lot of people needs your money to survive. Use your money to help them and not put them as a paper in bank and calculate the figure every day just like the rich man in my story above.

Do you ever set any goal about how much money you want to make in next year?

If you do then you must pay attention. You might fall into a trap. I agree that goal setting is an important process for us. It is a guide for us to plan our year accordingly so that we can achieve what we want to. If you want to make more money, you must set a clear and achievable money goal.

The Problem of Money Goal

I always set money goal. I’m making money from the Internet and this is a business that needs to be driven by goals and motivation. This is because it is a part time business where I take action in my spare time. So I need motivation to take action and sacrifice my spare time to exchange for a business income source. Otherwise I cannot take action because of laziness.

However, I always fail to achieve my goal. I always fail to achieve goals that I have set for my online business. If I want to give a mark to this “test”, I can tell you that I FAIL. I believe something must be wrong with me.

So I look back at my works and I found something common. That is I always stop taking action in the earliest stage. I never take action persistently until I achieve my goal.

The biggest problem that I have is I’m too focusing on the money goal. For example, I want to make $1000 in 1 month. So I usually divide the $1000 by 30 so that I know on average I have to make at least $33 per day. I wrote this down on a piece of paper and put it every where that I can see it. Then only I go out and take action.

But I’m not the lucky guy that always succeed in first few days. In day 1, I fail and I told myself that I’m just starting up. In day 2, I fail again and I told myself that it takes time. After 1 week, if I haven’t hit my goal to make $33 daily, I gave up because I worry, lost my focus and stopped taking actions.

I must do something on this or else I will never succeed in online business or any money goal that I set in my journey to financial freedom.

Finally I found the solution for the Money Goal Problem

I found a secret to overcome this problem. I wish I would have found this earlier so that I won’t waste so much of time.

Last week, I came across a short paragraph about how a spiritual leader, Dalai Lama, thinks about our current economic crisis. Personally I quite agree with what he said about our economy. Here are some of the points that you might interest in:

1. Our greed caused today’s global economic crisis. I totally agree with his words on this. We are living in the world where most people are so greedy and materialistic. We have too much things to buy and enjoy until we put a great honor on our money. The demands on money are increasing until everybody is so keen about it. This make a lot of people use improper ways to make more money until the collapse of the economy system.

2. The importance of transparent. People are worry about our economy because most of us didn’t prepare well for this. In fact, I believe there are many so called economy experts should know about this global economic crisis earlier than everyone of us. They should give some warning to the public and let people prepare for this crisis. However, the transparency on this method is not really clear and most people never know about this until the last minute. This is why so many people are suffering from this economic crisis.

3. The obsession with money. Sometime it is really funny how we should deal with our “money”. Money is important because we need it to survive. But if we become too obsession with money, we will suffer. So we must find a balance point where we will not too obsessive with money until we lost the direction to have a happy life.

4. The Buddhist approach to deal with economic crisis. Things happen because of some reasons. This is something that we called karma. We have been destroying all the economy system in the last decade, now it is time for us to deal with the crisis(results). Nothing we can do right now except learning how to accept the fact and the lesson so that we will not repeat the same mistake in future.

If you want to have a better management over your money and personal finance, one of the most important things that you must do is allocating time for it. You can allocate a certain amount of time into your daily schedule and focus on money management. It can be taking down your daily expenses, updating your budget or even reading a book about money.

Most of the time management books recommend us to set a schedule or time table for our daily life. This can ensure we can do whatever we need to do and yet never disturb our current lifestyle. For most people, they don’t have any timetable or limitation on their time. They do whatever they want to according to their idea at that moment. Their time can be disturbed very easy by their families and friends. This is why they achieve nothing at the end of the day.

So please set a special time for your money and personal finance. Once you set this, you will feel that things and people around you will be more tolerant with your timetable. For example, if your girl friend wants to chat with you over the phone. You can tell her that everyday 8pm to 9pm  is your time to manage and plan your finance. You can chat with her after that. In this way, she can chat with you and at the same time you have your personal time to manage your money. This is a win win situation where everybody is happy.

So please don’t give yourself too much of reasons not to do this. Busy is not a good reason because you can plan your time. Set a time to manage your money and you will fell the difference after doing this for some time. Besides that this is a good starting for you to approach the retirement and future that you want to. Remember, allocating time to manage your money.

If you follow my post about why we must retire as early as we can, you will know that there are a few benefits for us to retire early. So today, let’s discuss what kind of steps that we can take every day so that we can have a wealthy early retirement:

1. Save More Money. The key to retire early and wealthy is investment. It is about how we invest and grow our money so that we can retire early. This is why the first step we must take is save more money and let us have more money to invest.
2. Delay your gratification. In order to save more money, you have to delay your gratification and stop buying things that not really necessary or something that is expensive. I know this is the hardest part for us to do as we are facing so much of temptation today. But if you have a goal to retire early, this is a must. We only delay and buy later after we are wealthy and rich.
3. Build more income sources. One of the greatest way to save more money is have multiple sources of income. The more income you have, the more money you can save each month. This will greatly help you to boost the growing speed of your early retirement fund.
4. Reduce Debt and Accumulate wealth. Debt is dangerous if we don’t know how to handle it. So my advice is we must try our best to be debt free and let our finance back to the starting point of 0. After that we can fully concentrate on wealth accumulation by investing money and buying assets.
5. Take more risks in investment. Depends on your current age and income, if you are young and have multiple sources of income, then you should try to invest in those high return investments. Of course the risks are higher. My advice is you only can do this after you are debt free and have plenty of extra money on hands. Please make sure your life will not be ruined just in case your investment fails.
6. Buy VS Rent Your House? If you come to the age to buy your first house, you must think properly whether you should buy it or rent it. There are many factors involves in this decision. In most cases, house is the greatest asset because we will spend most our money in this asset. But it is also something that may affect our plan to retire early. So think properly before making decision.

Yes, it is not that easy to retire early as you have to sacrifice so much of things and have a life that is so different from others. Just like me, I always have different mindset in money when I talk to my friends. This is because I have different financial goal. No matter what you goal is, as long as you know what you are doing and what you want, then you are on the right track to achieve what you want.