On Making A Million & Staying In Love

You may know that I made my name online first as The Wealth Coach, later to become The Money Gym.  I did that by creating a weekly ezine, in which I talked about my own journey to learn how money works, how it could work for me, and the things I was learning and feeling along the way.  I used to archive those ezines, and link to them from my website, and what I didn’t realise was that this was an early form of blogging.

This got me indexed in the search engines, which brought me traffic, who signed up for my ezine, and this built me a mailing list over time.  When I launched The Money Gym coaching programme, one day in 2002 or 2003 I think it was, I sent out one email, gave away the first five places for good karma and attracted 26 odd paying clients.

The key to that success in the early days was consistency – I never missed a week of writing and sending that ezine, hard though it is for me to do ANYTHING consistently.

While I spend most of my time now coaching small businesses with their marketing, specifically their internet marketing, on how to create products and online services from what they do, know about or love, I’m still absolutely fascinated by the whole subject of money.

How to make it (ideally out of thin air) how we feel about it, how we react to it (and the lack of it Or the abundance of it)

Today, one of my favourite bloggers Yaro Starak has posted a fantastic post called “I’m A Million Dollar Blogger & How You Can Make A Million Dollars Too” and he includes his “7 Tips To Help You Become A Millionaire” – you can read it in full here

http://bit.ly/yarostarakmillions

Interestingly Yaro’s 7 Tips are not the “how to” kind, really.  They are the mindset kind.  And while this is frustrating for most people reading them (and I know because I used to find it frustrating when I was just starting out on my journey – this is the reason I wrote my book The Money Gym and stuffed it full of “how to” information)  I’m coming to believe that the mindset stuff is the real secret behind the secret of how to make a million pounds (or a million dollars).

As I always like to say……….Making money is simple.

Making money is simple but not always easy.

Think about those two statements for a moment.

Making money is simple.  There are only four ways to make money;  property, business, the stockmarket or the internet.  Pick one, find out the most successful strategy and get started.

What, still sitting there?

This is why I say that making money is simple but not easy.

Because if you don’t believe it’s possible, or you don’t believe it’s possible for you, or you don’t believe, deep down, that you deserve it, then you will simply never take the action needed in the “how to” and you will crumble at the first sign of a problem, challenge or other adversity.

And there will be problems, challenges and adversity.  Mindset is all about how you deal with them, how you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and carry on.

Talking of money, as I seem to be today, we had an interesting conversation last night about money and couples.  Particularly how do you deal with it fairly if one person earns much more than the other, or even nothing at all.

It’s an emotive subject and bearing in mind most divorcing couples cite money or infidelity as the reason for their split, it’s one that’s important to get right.  We were talking about it because my sister is in a new important relationship and she wants to get the money bit right too.

Options for handling your money when in a relationship are :

1. Put all the money earned by both into a bank account and pay everything out of it.
2. Put your earnings in separate bank accounts and contribute half each of the overhead of running your house / life
3. Come to another agreement.

T.Harv Ecker is the only wealth creation guru I know of that covers this and at the dinner table we were trying to recall how he suggested you deal with it.

Essentially, he says that you should tot up what it costs to run your household / life.  One sum for the essentials, one for contingencies, one for luxuries.  Add them together.

Then he reckons that each party should contribute an equal share of their earnings till the sum is covered.

So if your outgoings for a nice life are, say $5,000 a month or $60,000 per year and one person earns $100k a year, and one earns $30k a year, and both decide to put in 50% of their earnings, that would cover it (with a bit left over for savings).  One would be contributing $50k and one $15k, making a total of  $65k.

Sound fair to you?

And T.Harv went on to say that, if one person stayed at home to look after the kids for example, the couple should agree a fair “wage” for doing that, based on what it would cost to pay an outsider to do the same job.  So if you would need a full time nanny and a cleaner/housekeeper, the person deciding to stay at home would earn the combination of both because they are doing both jobs.  Plus a bit of chauffeuring too probably!

The earner would pay this “wage” to the house person, and then the above percentage sum would be worked out again, so both are contributing to the running of the household.

Of course, all this assumes that the person working is earning enough to make all this possible.  It gets complicated if the total earnings coming into the household is not enough to pay the stay at home person a salary.

The value of that stay at home person’s role must be calculated though, because all too often that person is totally undervalued (and sometimes even resented by the person going out to work).

And it’s totally demoralising when you have to ask the other person for money.

And how do you cope when you have a mixed pot of cash, but each person in the relationship has very different attitudes to money?  What if one thinks a holiday is essential but the other hates going away – or travels for work and really can’t care less about a holiday?

In The Money Gym we often came across clients who earned together, saved together, spent together, but when it came to investing, they didn’t feel they had any say in how their money was used.

When one person wanted to refinance to release equity to reinvest, for example, but their spouse was totally against it.  How do you decide who makes that decision? Is it just the one that shouts loudest?

How do most of you deal with your money if you are in a couple?  Love to hear your comments – use the “share your thoughts” link there.



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