The Mastery of Money—An Introduction

Releasing your energy from old, limiting beliefs and experiences about money does not mean you will automatically have a successful financial life. These beliefs and experiences have probably interfered with your interest in and ability to acquire the information you need to reach your financial goals.

If you already have information about managing your finances and creating wealth, but blocked energy has kept you from using it, go ahead and use what you already know—and stay open to acquiring new information. If you have missed this information in the past, for whatever reason, it’s now time to learn about managing your financial life.

Neither of us are financial professionals, so please consider this chapter a beginning. Rather than offering you financial advice, we will suggest avenues of learning we have traveled and share some of our experiences along the way.

Nearly boundless resources for acquiring information surround you. Choosing which will be most useful to you may seem overwhelming. We’ll point you to those that have been most helpful to us. However, our advice is no substitute for finding competent professional advisors when you are ready for them. We will offer you some guidelines about doing that as well.

Recognizing Potential Problems

It’s easy to fall into money traps and much harder to get out of them.

Jeremy fell into the student loan trap. His parents were not able to help him pay his college expenses and he knew that he could not earn enough to manage them himself. The school he attended offered a loan program and he took full advantage of it. He graduated thousands of dollars in debt.

His low paying, entry level job provided barely enough money to live comfortably, and he made only minimal payments on those loans for several years. He despaired of ever paying off the debts or accumulating enough money to buy a house or support a family.

Teri was offered a credit card immediately after enrolling in college. Thrilled, she accepted without considering her ability to pay her monthly bill. She regularly used the credit card to pay for activities she could not otherwise afford. When she graduated, she also felt overwhelmed by the burden of this debt. However, by living extremely frugally for several years, she managed to pay it off and regain her freedom.

Miranda and Peter accepted an invitation from a friend to learn about an amazing investment opportunity. The presenter painted a rosy picture of the expected outcome of this investment and cautioned that the window of opportunity to make this investment would soon close.

Their friend announced his intention to invest and encouraged them to take advantage of this opportunity while it was still available. They had no time to talk over their decision with anyone else and decided to invest a modest amount. After 2 years of inquiries about the progress of the project they learned that the investment had been a scam all along and that they could not recover any of their money.

These are just a few stories of the types of uninformed decisions that can lead you into falsely concluding that you just can’t win when it comes to mastering the money game. You may have your own stories and have come to similar conclusions.

If you have, reclaim your energy from these situations by using the Logosynthesis sentences and get ready for a fresh start.

Wealth and Abundance

Mastering money can be understood as a game with its own definitions and rules. One goal of this game is to produce wealth. Wealth is money and the things it can buy, that you keep and use throughout your life. When you use this wealth in a way that is congruent with your life’s purpose you experience abundance.

Accumulating wealth can also lead to financial independence. When you are financially independent the wealth you have accumulated produces enough money to cover your regular living expenses and you no longer need to earn additional money by working.

How anyone does this may seem like a mystery to you now. Certainly, neither of us understood it at the beginnings of our journeys. One series of allegories that explain the journey clearly is found in the 1926 book, The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason.

In this story, set in ancient Babylon, a rich man mentors a young man and slowly teaches him the rules to creating wealth. These rules are just as valid today as they were nearly 100 years ago, which probably accounts for the continuing popularity of the book and the many summaries of it available online.

Your chances of successfully producing wealth depend upon you understanding and following the time-honored guidelines included in Clason’s book and most other books on financial success. We list several other books we like later in this chapter.