The Secret Language of Money: How to Make Smarter Financial Decisions and Live a Richer Life: How To Make Smarter Financial Decisions and Lead a Richer Life - Hardcover

KRUEGER

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0071623396 ISBN 13: 9780071623391

Verlag: McGraw Hill, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

If money were about math, none of us would be carrying any debt.

The numbers are simple. What's complicated is what we do with money. We use money to soothe our feelings and buy respect, to show how much we care or how little. We don't simply earn, save, and spend money: we flirt with it, crave it, and scorn it; we punish and reward ourselves with it.

Without realizing it, we give money meaning it doesn't really have-what former psychiatrist and current business coach David Krueger calls our "money story." And in the process of playing out that money story, we often sacrifice the most important things in our life: our health, freedom, relationships, and happiness.

What is your money story?

• Do you consistently spend more than you have?
• Do you follow the herd in your investments-even though you know the herd is usually wrong?
• Have you neglected to save for the future, even when you have the means?
• Do you feel controlled or shackled by debt?
• Is your money somehow never "enough"?
• Is money, or the lack of it, always on your mind?
  

The Secret Language of Money is a guided tour to the subconscious meanings we give money, the conflicted ways our brain deals with money, the reasons we tend to make the same money mistakes over and over-and most importantly, how you can change all that.

A brilliant blend of cutting-edge science and real-world application, The Secret Language of Money helps you rewrite your money story and find that elusive balance of wealth, health, and joy we all seek.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Krueger, M.D., formerly practiced and taught psychiatry and psychoanalysis for more than 25 years. He is currently CEO of MentorPath, an executive coaching practice serving corporate executives and healing professionals, and he serves as Mentor Coach and Dean of Curriculum for the Coach Training Alliance. Krueger lives in Houston, Texas.
John David Man has been writing about business, leadership, and the laws of success for more than 20 years. He is coauthor of the Wall Street Journal bestseller The Go-Giver and the Silver Nautilus Award-winning A Deadly Misunderstanding and author of The Zen of MLM. Mann lives in Massachusetts.

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MONEY TALKS—BUT WHAT IS IT SAYING?

“A fascinating exploration into how we think about money and why — and perhaps even more importantly, what we can do about it. I strongly recommend it.”
David Bach, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Start Late, Finish Rich and Fight For Your Money

“Quick question: Does dealing with/thinking about/earning/spending moneymake you happy, or does it stress you out? If it’s not making you happy, youneed to read this extraordinary book, right away.”
Seth Godin, author of the New York Times bestseller Tribes

“Now more than ever, we need someone to help us make sense out of moneyand the crazy things we do with it. David Krueger is that voice of sanity.”
John Assaraf, CEO of OneCoach and coauthor of the New York Times bestseller The Answer

“Our relationship with money is like an iceberg: only the very tip is in plainsight. The authors do a masterful job of uncovering this information andhelping us fix that relationship. Don’t be surprised ifthe result shows up in your bottom line.”
Bob Burg, coauthor of the international bestseller The Go-Giver

“This is not a how-to of personal finance, it’s a how-much: How much has yourpersonal money story been holding you back? And how much could you earnif you changed that?”
Chris Widener, author of the New York Times bestseller The Angel Inside

“For every thousand books written on personal finance and success, there isalways that one gem that can truly make a difference in people’s lives.This is that book—and it’s a must-read!”
Cameron Johnson, television personality and author of You Call the Shots

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THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF MONEY

HOW TO MAKE SMARTER FINANCIAL DECISIONS AND LEAD A RICHER LIFEBy DAVID KRUEGER JOHN DAVID MANN

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2009 David Krueger
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-162339-1

Contents

Chapter One

MONEY TALKS—BUT WHAT IS IT SAYING?

If there's something strange in the neighborhood, Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters! If there's something weird and it don't look good, Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters!

—Theme song to Ghostbusters, music and lyrics by Ray Parker, Jr.

Something strange was going on, all right. When Alex Popov set off for San Francisco's PacBell Park that morning, softball glove in hand, it had seemed like a good plan. It just didn't turn out that way.

Two nights before, the San Francisco Giants had played well past midnight in the longest nine-inning game in Major League history, only to lose to the L.A. Dodgers. Today, on Sunday, October 7, 2001, in their last game of the season, the Giants came back with a 2-to-1 victory. But that wasn't what made history that day. No, the epic moment came in the first inning, when Barry Bonds hit a knuckleball from the Dodgers' Dennis Spring and sent it clear over the fence into the arcade, setting a new all-time record by swatting his seventy-third home run in a single season.

When Bonds hit his homer into the stands, the fans went wild — and in this instance, that is not a figure of speech.

Anticipating the smash hit and knowing that Bonds tended to favor right field, especially enterprising fans had packed that standing-room-only area hoping for a serious shot at the record-breaking ball. And exactly two fans—Popov, owner of a Berkeley health-food restaurant, and a software engineer named Patrick Hayashi — got their wish. As the ball hit Popov's glove, he was instantly tackled, thrown to the ground and buried in a swarm of determined fans. In the ensuing mayhem, Hayashi came up, ball in hand. Eyewitness testimony (later disputed) would claim that Hayashi bit a teenage boy and even grabbed Popov's crotch in an attempt to get control of the ball. A cameraman's videotape of the entire fracas proved inconclusive.

The court battle between Popov and Hayashi raged for months—the two as fierce as litigants in any custody case—until 20 months later, in June, 2003, a judge decreed that the ball be auctioned off and the two fans split the proceeds. The ball was eventually purchased at auction for $450,000 by Todd MacFarlane, creator of the Spawn comic book series, netting Popov and Hayashi each a cool $225,000—which didn't even come close to covering court costs. In fact, Popov would have needed to net more than twice that amount just to cover his legal expenses. To make matters worse, the two men owed taxes on the entire auction income of $450,000.

After nearly two years of legal brawling, Popov and Hayashi were both heavily in debt, and MacFarlane had his slightly used baseball for the bargain price of $450,000.

And here the story goes from odd to odder still.

That single-season record Bonds broke had previously been set by Mark McGwire, who hit his seventieth single-season home run in 1998. That winning baseball had also been purchased by MacFarlane for $3.2 million —which represented "most of his life savings," as he told newsmen. In a previous deal, costing him about $300,000, MacFarlane had also purchased the first, sixty-seventh, sixty-eighth, and sixty-ninth home run baseballs of McGwire's 1998 season.

Each ball had cost about $5 to manufacture.

What happened here? Something strange indeed; something that defies normal logic. And while Popov, Hayashi, and MacFarlane's story may seem a little extreme, it's really not so different from the stories of people we know well.

A single mom of 38, Barbara is in a tough spot. Recently divorced, with custody of her two teenage children, she is approaching middle age and struggling to make ends meet. Her fixed salary and meager child-support payments are barely adequate to support her family's basic needs. Money is tight, at best, and Barbara's financial prospects look grim.

Barbara has a strategy for dealing with her subsistence lifestyle, which, if not the most logical course of action, has the dubious advantage of simplicity: She shops.

Despite her precarious finances, Barbara goes on frequent spending sprees. On one day's forage alone, she brought home a $250 silk blouse, a $175 silver ring, and a pair of $825 silver earrings. With every day that passes, with each shopping spree, Barbara is inching herself and her family ever closer to the precipice of utter financial meltdown. And the closer to the edge she gets, the more she shops and spends.

Robert's story begins on the opposite end of the money spectrum from Barbara's: Where she started in a tight spot, Robert set out from a place of affluence.

It was only 12 years ago that Robert found himself an unusually wealthy man. When his father died, Robert inherited $20 million, enough to ensure his financial security for a lifetime. Yet by the time I met him, Robert had managed to spend nearly every penny.

Distant and emotionally isolated, Robert's father had lavished him with money and expensive gifts all his life. Robert recognized his father's financial magnanimity as an expression of guilt, a poor proxy that scarcely compensated for his absence in his son's life. Robert now sustained his anger at his father, as he described it, "by pissing away my father's money, gambling and making bad investments." The bad investments piled one upon the other. Robert's poker losses became larger and more frequent; he lost several thousand dollars in a single session.

Having attained complete financial independence, Robert now seemed determined to spend his way to bankruptcy.

Something strange in the neighborhood. Something weird, and it don't look good.

Money, Money Everywhere

Over the first five decades following the close of World War II, something remarkable happened: We grew steadily richer. A lot richer. During the second half of the twentieth century, more wealth was created in the United States alone than had ever before existed on the planet. By the new millennium, even America's poor had reached a standard of living higher than the middle class of the 1950s. Our homes were larger, our cars more luxurious than ever, and necessities such as food and water were cheap, abundant, and close at hand. Any measurement of life using the wealth yardstick during those times told us exactly what we love to hear: Life is good and getting better.

Yet underneath the glitter, something was amiss.

Our perennial competitors, the Joneses, may have looked good on the outside, but the numbers revealed a different story. Despite our growing levels of apparent affluence, savings rates had dropped to an all-time low, and debt had climbed to an all-time high. By 2001, Americans owed more than $1.7 trillion in consumer debt—almost three times the value of all the U.S. dollars in circulation—and bankruptcies began to skyrocket.

By 2008, the onrush of affluence seemed to have slammed into full reverse. Corporate scandal, bad debt, collapsing housing markets, and shifting international demographics had launched the first genuinely global financial crisis in history. The ride, at least for the moment, was over.

And what a strange ride it's been. After winning what might best be described as an economic...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: McGraw Hill
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0071623396
• ISBN 13: 9780071623391
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 289
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: McGraw-Hill Education; https://www.mheducation.co.in/; ; Via Verdi, 8; Assago Milano; 20090; Italien