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Excerpt from the Book
Introduction
The title — Spend Joyfully — sounds inappropriate for what has recently happened to the economy, both here in the United States and the world at large. But, spending is what will bring our economy back to health. And to Spend Joyfully is not simply to go on a shopping spree.
Let me ask you to pretend for a minute. Regardless of your age or cultural makeup, for this exercise “pretend” you are single, in your late twenties, and live with a roommate. That is just to give you permission to think like this for a short while.
Imagine waking up in your house the day after you have thrown a huge party. Let your imagination run with this idea a little bit … let’s say you invited many friends to the party, but things got out of hand when your friends started inviting people you didn’t know. The party seemed to be a lot of fun and you let it continue. Heck, some of the strangers turned out to be really great folks to have at a party.You hadn’t planned on the party getting this big, but that turned out okay as people brought snacks and drinks to share.
Now, as you wake up, you find the house is a total mess … and you don’t feel too good. You are hung-over and there are grease stains in your roommate’s oriental rug where someone stepped on a sandwich. The wine spill on your sofa is another matter. The kitchen will take hours to clean and organize. Only then will you find that some of the glassware is broken.
You get the idea.
Now quit pretending and look at your finances. Is there is a parallel to the party house? Welcome to today’s economy.
We’ve been in a party mood for several years. Credit has let us do things we now realize we shouldn’t have been doing. We put our trust in people and ideas we didn’t really know. Those people told us it was okay to party with our credit cards and Home Equity credit lines. They showed us how to do it and it was a great party. Now we see a mess that needs to be cleaned up. Hello!
To clean up this mess, your first reaction is to stop spending — totally. After all, you need to use your money to pay off your debt. But when everybody stops buying, business dies. Jobs are being lost, and yours could be the next one on the chopping block. To keep jobs, we have to keep spending.Your income is generated, in some way, by other people spending money.
The truth is, you can’t totally stop spending money. If you could do that, you wouldn’t need money in the first place. But in our world, you need to pay for a place to live, for clothing, and for food. Each one of these purchases involves making a choice... How much do I choose to spend on housing so that I’ll have money left for clothing and food? Today, it’s harder to get credit than it used to be. You don’t have the option of using credit to get what you want and simply hope it works out in the future. Now, you really need to live within your means. You don’t want to spend money you don’t have.
When you get down to the very basics issues of paying for what you really need to have, and you are not sure you will have a job, or that you can get a new credit card to charge to, the choices you make begin to look very important. If you get too much of one thing, you won’t be able to get something else you need.
The stress of making those choices — those purchase decisions — with actual money and no wiggle room offered by credit is very real stress. There is nothing “joyful” about those decisions. But learning better ways to track your money and evaluate purchasing opportunities can greatly reduce the stress. In fact, if you know you have made a good decision in what you buy, it can be JOYFUL.
That is what this book is about — Learning to SPEND money joyfully, responsibly, with satisfaction, and without guilt or regret.
Being confident of your choices can make you feel rich beyond what you feel today. But if you think of “rich” as having a lot of money, there will always be somebody with more money than you have.
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