So I have been talking to my therapist about how my money issues are stressing me out, and he has suggested that I look into the book “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind” and the “Millionaire Mindset” seminars. Has anyone here had any experience with this program? I’m personally more than a little skeptical about paying for self-help seminars, but I’m willing to set aside my cynicism if it would actually be helpful.
Is your therapist a millionaire?
Heh, I didn’t ask, but I get the impression that’s he’s fairly well-off. He said he found it very helpful for himself, and that he drove down to Chicago and volunteered to help out at one of their recent seminars. So he’s either found it very helpful or drunk the Kool-aid, depending on your perspective.
Secret of The Straight Dope mind:
Find another therapist.
My thought on that book is that I need to finish it. I started it back in February and am only halfway through. A lot of it makes sense, but I’m one of those rare Dopers who thinks that there is something to the Law of Attraction.
I can’t remember where I read it, but someone mentioned that a lot of smart, clear-headed people think it’s all bunk. (Or it may have been Think and Grow Rich.) This same person pointed out that those clear, smart-headed people are also poor.
I checked out his Wiki page first…and found a small puff piece that was probably written by his PR flack. All the links went directly to his site and/or to sites that sold his program. I tried googling and came across the same problem, except for this rare link.
I’m home now and sitting next to the book, so I can tell you a little more about it.
It’s not about investment strategies or how to pick a good stock. It’s about thinking the way a rich person thinks. When you consider it, what does a rich person have that a poor person doesn’t? (Besides money.) It’s not education, or upbringing, or luck. It’s how they think. And without thinking the right way about money, all of the best investment strategies aren’t going to work.
He gives the analogy of a fruit tree. Everyone wants lots of ripe fruit. When the fruit is scarce, we tend to focus on the fruit more, and wondering why we don’t have enough. What we should be looking at is the roots of the tree. Are they healthy? Are they getting enough water? Are they in good soil?
The idea is to change your relationship with money so that you generate it instead of grasping at ever diminishing amounts of it.
He has the reader think about what attitudes they might have about money. For example, when growing up, a lot of people hear that money is the root of all evil, rich people are greedy, materialism is bad, or whatever. The message is that only bad people get to have money, and we don’t want to be bad, so we somehow figure out ways to get rid of money. It can be a conscious thing or a subconscious thing. The point is to figure out if that’s going on for you, and how to address it. He gives some examples of people that make something like $900,000 a year and are still broke.
That’s part one. Part two is a bunch of comparisons between rich and poor thinking. For example (taken at random):
Rich people admire other rich and successful people.
Poor people resent rich and successful people.
Rich people are bigger than their problems.
Poor people are smaller than their problems.
Rich people have their money work for them.
Poor people work hard for their money.
With each example he gives a pretty detailed explanation, and then gives some action steps.
Does it work? I don’t know. I only read about half way, but before I read it, I was really struggling. Now I’m getting through the holiday season with my bills paid on time and with cash to spare. It may be a total coincidence. But I know that lately I’ve been way more aware of how I spend.
Is it all some big woo woo scam? That’s up for you to say. But the book is only $22. It might be a wise investment into finding out how you relate to money.
I don’t resent the rich; I have cultivated pure undiluted hatred for them.
A better investment might be to check it out of your local library first.
I haven’t read it myself. I remember recently hearing that something like 70% of professional athletes are broke within 3 years of retiring from sports. And I know tons of musicians end up broke not long after their careers start to slow down.
Then there is the concept of ‘shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations’, which states that about 60% of the time that a parent amasses a family fortune, it is gone by the time the kids are through with it, and 90% of the time it is gone by the time the grandkids are through with it.
Anyway, I don’t know how or if it is related to what your OP is about, but things like that always remind me that it isn’t just how much money you make or what your expenses are, it is also how much value you place in money itself and relate to money.
I don’t know if the concept of the subconscious can explain it though. I would assume factors like a lack of education and maturity, or a lack of ever having to work hard for a dollar are more important for the above examples (a high school dropout who becomes wealthy at 25 by being in a famous band probably won’t think about money the same way a small business owner who worked 80 hour weeks for 10 years straight, then sold his company will).
Generally, when people throw money at someone (esp someone without much education or maturity) w/o you working very hard for it it seems people tend to blow it. But I don’t think that relates to their views that money itself is moral or immoral.
But on the subject, another good book is ‘your money or your life’, which encourages people to think of money as something they exchange time and effort for. You calcualte how many minutes or hours you had to work in order to have the money to buy XYZ, then try to figure out if the expense is worth it. Doing that you start to realize that some expenses are totally wasted, while others are a good bargain.
I’m not familiar with that book, but I’ve read a couple of the Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy’s books and they sound similar. The Millionare Next Door and Susie Orman’s books are also pretty good. The only problem I have with these sort of books is that they sort of give the impression that you can make a ton of money if only you adopt the right mindset. The right mindset is important to be successful, however, the reality is that most people don’t have the wherewithal to become a millionare. That does not mean they can’t live a financially healthy lifestyle though.
The fact of the matter is as **tdn **pointed out, a lot of people do have a shitty attitude and it can and does affect their ability to achieve success and financial health. Skim any thread on this board and you will see it.
A lot of these books also seem to focus on saving money and cutting spending and compounding interest and stuff. That’s good advice, however having a million dollars when I’m 80 doesn’t do me much good. Rich people EARN more money than poor people. Unless you look for alternate sources of income, you are sort of constrained by the earning potential of your chosen profession.
I question the money making skills of a therapist who would recommend you go buy a book from somewhere else rather than make money teaching you the same things.
I’m not sure if that’s a joke answer or a real answer, but it raises an interesting point.
Buy or borrow?
If you borrow then you’ve saved yourself 22 bucks. That seems like a wise money-saving strategy.
But let’s take it into slightly more woo woo territory.
If you’re unwilling to buy it, then you’re sending a message to yourself that you are not worth investing in yourself. You’re saying “I’m a cheap bastard that’s such a penny pincher that I can’t even be bothered to buy a book that could make me rich.”
Another thing is that if you’re not into giving mode, you’re not in receiving mode either. It’s kind of like wanting to get a lot of Christmas cards without being willing to send any out. If you block off that energy of giving you’ll block off the energy of receiving. You have to be kind of “in the system” of giving and receiving. Eker talks about this a bit. He mostly talks about how “It is better to give than to receive”, and what a crock that is. If you want wealth, you have to be willing to receive wealth, but you also have to be willing to give value of some sort. It’s an equation.
A little too woo? Maybe, but I think there’s something to it.
He’s making money doing what he loves, what he’s been trained to do, and giving the most value that he has. And part of the value that he offers is pointing his patient to a resource that’s a better authority on the subject than he is. I don’t see anything questionable in that.
What if I told you that he also told me about how his son attended this intensive, five-day seminar on website building that they held, and how other people at the seminar were making tens of thousands of dollars a week, and would I be interested in getting in on this, and here’s a free ticket ($795 value!) to one of their seminars? Does that seem questionable?
(I’m not trying to attack you or anything, because no, you didn’t know any of this, but it seems really skeevy to me.)
You just pretty much described how poor people think: I spend more money than I have to, to prove how important it is to me!!!
You don’t have to spend money to prove anything, nor should you ever spend money for that purpose. You should spend money to acquire a thing or a service, that’s what money does: you trade it for goods and services. You should get the goods or service at the minimum price you can, for the right item in the quality you desire. If you are trading your money for feelings (spending a certain way to feel a certain way) you will always be poor.
If getting it from the library is too much effort/inconvenient/the borrow times are too short/the copy is always checked out, buy it used off Amazon.
BTW, I’m not too familiar with the book in the OP, but I think “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” is a load of horseshit. My father was both a professor and an entrepreneur, something that is apparently impossible according to RD/PD, because academics can’t value anything but pure knowledge, and entrepreneurs would rather hit themselves in the head with rocks than read a book.
Live below your means. Everything else is gravy.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery
-Charles Dickens, “David Copperfield”.
That’s the whole nut right there, and it may be the smartest thing I’ve heard in a very long while.
I think much about Robert T. Kiyosaki is horse shit.
Well, you can spend the money if you have it!
But poor people often do spend penny wise but pound foolish. They are unwilling or unable to put off immediate gratification for future benefit.
Although lot of it is a mindset that everything is outside of their control. When you believe you have no control over your situation, you don’t take actions to rectify it.
I’m a big believer is “positive thinking”. Not in a idiotic “everyone be super duper positive” sort of way. I mean positive in terms of taking specific actions with the intent to achieve a certain goal. You can’t control what the world does, but you can control what you do.
I think that this is pretty much the heart of what Eker says.