I always heard the story that people keep complaining that they don’t have enough money to spend or don’t have any money left at the end of the month. They are living paycheck to paycheck. But to me they are considered the lucky one because many people are living credit card to credit card. Yes, they are having negative cash flow and have to use their debt to survive.

Actually in most cases, there is something wrong with their cash flow management. There must be something happening in their way to spend money before that caused this cash flow problem. The theory of the law of cause and effect applies here. If you want to know the reasons, you can refer to my article Reasons Why People Are in Debt.

Mind Your Own Cash Flow  

If you read the book rich dad and poor dad before, you will know that one of the lessons that you need to learn is Mind Your Own Business. It is not about starting a business and taking care of it. In fact, the “business” here is your cash flow, your money and your future. Those are the important things for your life.

I always believe that if you want to success in your life, the first thing you must win is in your cash flow game. According to Anthony Robbins, there are 5 things we master and keep them in balance if we want to success. They are:

1. Emotion Mastery – Master the way we feel
2. Physical Mastery – Master the health of our body
3. Relationship Mastery – Master our social life
4. Financial Mastery – Master our personal finance or money
5. Time Mastery – Master the time management.

As you can see, money is part of our success and it can affect other mastery too. Each of them is inter-related. I believe you have heard a lot of stories about how people ruin their relationship because of money or even loss control their emotion due to the debts.

So the conclusion here is Mind Your Own Cash Flow (Business) is the first step to success.

Everyday we have to face a lot of choices and make a lot of decisions. It is our decisions that shape our destiny and future. This is also matching the theory of Karma where what you do today will determine the results you will get in future.

This is why it is your decision whether you want to be rich or be poor in future. The theory is also simple. If you want to be rich in future, then you have to make some kind of decisions that can make you rich today. So what kind of decisions that we have to make everyday that will make us rich? To make it simple, there are only 2 categories of decisions that can make us rich – Time and Money.

Our Decisions on Time and Money

The world is fair that everyone of us is given 24 hours per day. Our success is determined by how we spend our time everyday. For example, if you want a healthy body, then you have to spend part of your 24 hours to exercise. If you want to be rich, then you have to spend some of the time to do something that can make you rich, for example learning how to invest and etc. So our decision on time will determine what kind of actions we will take and shape our destiny.

Another category of decision is Money. How we spend our money will determine the wealth that we will have in future. Most of the financial problems that people have today are because of their decision on spending money. If you think that today is your payday and you want to go shopping without any plans, then you might end up with a lot of debts. But if you set a budget, save up some money and buy assets, then you might end up wealthy in future.

Decisions that can make you Rich

Yesterday I was listening to a local radio station channel on my way to attend an appointment. The program is a discussion program that covers a weekly topic and interview with some of the experts for a discussion. This week their topic is Should we blame ourselves for not enough money?

Yesterday was the last day for this discussion and they covered another interesting topics that how to be rich and happy. According to the expert, most rich people are not happy as what we always imagine. Yes they might have a lot of money and they can own most of the things that they want. However, in fact they have lost something valuable that make them regret and unhappy. The expert gave a few examples on this issue which he collected through his professional. Yes, he is a counselor.

What it Takes To Be Rich and Happy?

According to the expert, we will happy only if we can fulfill the 5 categories of “needs”. Of course part of it is financial or money. So if you want to be rich and happy, then we must also fulfill another 4 “needs” listed below:

• Relationship – Besides money, we are also looking for love, cares and encouragements from our friends and families. While we are fighting for our goal to be rich, we need some supports or encouragements from people around us. After we succeed, we always look for someone to celebrate and share our success. This is our human nature of thinking. Don’t you agree that all of us need love from others to be happy? So if you are fighting for your goal, please don’t forget your love one and families. According to the counselor, most people will ignore their relationship with others and hence break it. This is also the main reason why some rich people are not happy because they lose their love one.

• Health – I always hear that “health is our biggest wealth”. I agree with this statement. So in order to be happy, we must own 2 kinds of “wealth”. One is money and another is our health. Please imagine that if your body is weak and sick, you will not have the power and mood to spend your money to get something you like. Instead, you always spend your money on medical treatment. Do you think you will happy if your life is like this? For example, I love travelling and I think most people will be the same like me. Travelling is an activity that needs both health and money. If I lost anyone of them, my life will be suffering and gloom. This is why health is very important for us.

• Emotional Mastery – I believe that our emotion is very important for us and it can affect anything in our life directly. Emotional Mastery means controlling our emotion. I always call this “increasing our EQ (Emotion intelligence)”. I found that by mastering our emotion, we can actually master other fields of our life too. For example, if we can master our emotion and stop being angry in certain time, we can actually avoid a lot of argument and save our relationship with people around us. If we can control our emotion and also others’ emotion, we can run our business very well and make lot of money. Or even for the most basic, we can control our emotion and be happy at anytime, anywhere that we want to. At this moment, you don’t really depend on money to be happy instead you can control your emotion and be happy.

• Time Freedom – We all love freedom, don’t you? People have different definition on time freedom. For me, time freedom means that you can have more choice to do something you like and love instead of follow a fix schedule. For example, the reason why I don’t like a job is because it controls my time. I just feel I’m lacking of choice and freedom on my time because I have to go to my office in certain time. Besides that it also disturbs my life too. So I agree with the counselor that if we own most of the money in the world but we don’t have time to do something that we enjoy and love, then we might suffer from our life.

Follow our Heart and Personal Intuition

I believe that our heart knew the best for us. Sometime it is good for us to follow our personal intuition. Our subconscious actually knew what is good and what is bad for us. So our personal intuition can be a good signal from our subconscious mind. So follow it and we can live happily.

Year 2008 is around the corner and we are now in the busy December. We are busy in December because we have to prepare for the Christmas Day and also the New Year Celebration. Some of us might busy for the year-end holiday. A lot of shopping and planning have to be done within this month.

Besides shopping and holiday planning, there is actually a process that we cannot miss out. It is Goal Setting for the coming up 2008. You can set any goals for 2008 but I would like to remind you to set a financial goal for yourself so that you can take some serious actions for your personal finance.

Don’t know what to set? Don’t worry, in order to assist you on this, I have categorized the top 5 financial goals that you can set for your life. Here they are:

This is an article that talks about why some people can be rich and make money easily while other just struggle from paycheck to paycheck. You have to find the key, the true key to open the box of wealthy and open bright future for yourself.

Do you ever suspect or think about why one person can make so much of money while another just barely cover basic expenses?

Lately, I was searching for a new house for my family. I went to several housing area and I found that different housing area has different kind of house prices. Yes, I understand that there are many factors that will make one area more expensive than others. Let’s not discuss this topic and change our focus on the owners.

I found that some people are so rich that they can afford properties that worth millions of dollar. Some of them even located at a good location and as you and I can imagine, the price is sky rocket. However, on the other side, there are people that still struggle and hardly buy a small tiny house. This makes me curious the true reason why the gap is so big between them.

What make others Wealthier?

I keep thinking the question and I know I must find the key. All of us are human with the same talent given by God. Then why someone is making more money than us? We must find out the true reason because this is the key for us to be rich and wealthy.

After doing some researches and observations on the rich people around me (both my mentor and my customers), I began to formulate the answer. I found that a person’s financial condition is not only depending on the external factors such as how much money they make and invest, but also on their internal environment which about the relationship between them and their money. This is the most important factor that determines the wealth of someone because this is the foundation of how people will handle their money.

Your Relationship with Money

I can see that our relationship with money is the foundation for our wealth. As my mentor always says “You must love the money to make the money love you”. Before this I was quite confuse with what he had said. But today, I can understand this.

Our relationship of money will reflect our thoughts, beliefs and feeling on the subject of money. For example, if you love money, you will try all your best to make money and the most important thing is you enjoy the process. Don’t you agree that if you enjoy doing something, usually it will be your hobby and you can do it every well? You will spend most of your time on it and make it the best! This is why almost all the rich people enjoy making money, talking about money and eventually make the money loves them and follows them.

I can observe this from one of my customers who can make a lot of money easily from stock market easily while others complain it is risky. Others are complaining risky but for him, it is easy and enjoyable to make money from stock market.

How to Make Friend with Money

Now you know how important it is to make friend with your money. If you want to be rich, financial free or simply own the wealth that people around you admire at, then you must learn how to deal with your money. Below are some of the tips that I can give you which I learned from my observation over the rich people around me:

1. Change your mind – Change your mind that “Money is not Evil” and start loving it.

2. Understand your inner phobia on money. If you have some bad experience on money, don’t hesitate to find someone and discuss it. This will help you face your problem properly. You can contact me and discuss with me if you want

3. Talk more about money. People will discuss their favorites with others, so start talking about money today!

4. Spend over Earn Ratio. Please make sure you always spend less than you earn. This will make money feel that you love them and follow you. This is what my mentor told me.

5. Appreciate your money. We appreciate our money because it can help us to buy something that we need and love. It is a friend that help us to buy what we love.

Conclusion

Your relationship with money is very important. I believe this is the most basic foundation for our personal finance. We must learn how to make a good relationship with money before talking about how to manage them. I believe if you have a great relationship with money and you love them, then you will know how to manage them very well. This same theory also applies on car where a person who loves car will take a good care on the car.

Love Your Money and It will Love You Too!