I was walking through my favorite grocery store yesterday and couldn’t help notice all of the merchandise on display for Valentine’s Day. The greeting card aisle was stocked with every type of Valentine’s Day card imaginable. And the intoxicating scent of chocolate wafting from the candy section was enough to make my mouth water.
Although I didn’t buy any V-Day goodies, I began to think about the real significance of this holiday. For those of us already in a relationship, February 14th is typically a day to exchange tokens of affection. But for those of us who are looking for love, Valentine’s Day may be the perfect time to begin the search for your personal finance soulmate.
What does finding your sweetheart have to do with how you manage your money?
If you consider that many of the sources of relationship and marital discontent stem from a couple’s inability to communicate about and resolve personal finance issues, then finding a partner with whom you are financially compatible makes a lot of sense (or cents.
Using ‘SOULMATE’ as an acronym, here is my eight step guide to attracting your money-wise partner and charting a course to financial freedom:
S - Spend your time as if you were making an investment. Make sure you’re getting growth and the best return possible. Many people are afraid to be alone and just want to be with someone. Why settle for less than you really want when there are dozens of other choices you could make? Make sure you are getting what you need and that the relationship is progressing in a direction you both want.
O – Owe your partner nothing … except honesty. Do not mislead, lie or cheat. Nothing good will ever come of it. If you ever borrow money from your partner, make the terms of repayment crystal clear and follow through exactly as promised.
U – Understand your money type and that of your partner. People who have excellent credit and little or no debt are rarely compatible with partners who are chronically late on their bills and have huge credit card balances. S/he may have a great body and a six figure income, but if you spend more than you make, it doesn’t matter how much money you earn. Financial freedom will elude you.
L – Learn about strategies for creating wealth, eliminating debt and saving for retirement. Read books, attend seminars, listen to experts, talk with other people you know in your situation, get solid recommendations from trusted advisors and create a plan to help you achieve your personal finance dreams.
Continue reading "How to Attract Your Personal Finance Soulmate" »
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Do you understand what a credit score actually measures? Do you know what a good score is? What’s the best way to improve your credit score?
The Consumer Federation of America reports that most consumers do not fully comprehend how these mysterious three-digit ratings are used.
Those of us who have purchased a home know that mortgage lenders utilize these numbers to determine risk; how risky it is for them to lend us money. But only a minority of consumers are aware that electric utilities, home insurers and landlords frequently use credit scores to decide whether to sell us a service and at what price.
Let’s look at this FICO score-driven mortgage loan pricing scenario…
According to Fair Isaac, the company that guards their FICO credit score formula more closely than Coca-Cola guards its soft drink recipe, a homebuyer with a 720 credit score would be charged 5.72% on a thirty year fixed rate mortgage. That would result in monthly principal and interest payments of about $868.00.
Continue reading "How a Credit or FICO Score Can Affect More Than Your Mortgage Payment" »
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We’ve all made personal finance decisions that we later regretted. How many times have you said, “… if I had only known then what I know now, everything would be different …”
About twenty years ago I sold my electric guitar. I hated to part with it but I needed the money to pay bills. I also felt that someday I would be able to replace it. I knew the guitar was a collectible when I sold it.
The buyer paid me nine hundred dollars, which was a lot of money back then. Today that same guitar is worth more than ten-thousand dollars!
Do I regret my decision? Absolutely! The choice to sell was made out of quiet desperation because I had no savings and I was doing a very good job of personal finance mismanagement.
Continue reading "Why a Personal Finance Emergency Fund is so Important in Financial Planning" »
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Do you remember hearing the clerks at many of the mall stores offer you 10% off your total purchase by opening a department store credit card with them?
Those hard to resist offers were tempting, especially during the holiday rush. But you might be suffering from self-inflicted personal finance injury if you took advantage of too many of those in-store special promotions.
Here’s the problem …
Retailers love to tell you that you can save an extra 10 to 20 percent by opening a store card account. The problem is interest rates are typically very high for these credit cards. So the 25 dollar savings off the $250 leather jacket could quickly turn into a 40 dollar interest payment, if you carry the balance for even one month. And if you opened several of these store accounts, your credit score most certainly suffered as the result of multiple inquiries over a short period of time.
Continue reading "Is That a Credit Card in Your Wallet or Purse or Are You Just Happy to See Me?" »
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One of my best friends owns a gift store in Pennsylvania. He is a very successful businessman who, along with his wife, has built two profitable retail outlets from the ground up.
His current venture has less than 1,500 square feet of selling space, yet my friend has been able to send his children to expensive private schools, save at least fifteen percent of his income and pays off his credit card bills every month.
If you walked past my friend on the street, you wouldn’t think he ‘looked wealthy’, yet he has a net worth of a million dollars.
How did he achieve financial freedom at the ripe old age of fifty?
He didn’t inherit it. And he doesn’t wear his wealth on his wrist or park it in his garage.
Instead, he and his wife were fanatics about saving, and built their seven figure personal finance balance sheet with shrewd investments.
My friend realized from a very young age that the real price of an item isn’t just the out-of-pocket cost. It is the forgone wealth that money compounded over time can earn you.
Noted business author Michael LeBoeuf offers up five reasons why saving is your key to financial freedom. The following examples are based on an index fund investment averaging an 11 percent annual return:
Continue reading "Are You Driving Your Financial Freedom?" »
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Just imagine yourself as a young child standing at the end of a diving board hanging over the deep end of a swimming pool. Your heart is thumping in your chest. You’re terrified because you’ve never been in water over your head.
You think the worst is going to happen and your body will suddenly plummet to the bottom as soon as you hit the water.
Your swimming instructor is standing at the side of the pool reassuring you and urging you to take the plunge.
You have a decision to make. Will you allow fear to prevent you from being successful at something new? Or will you listen to the ‘voice by the side of the pool’ and jump in feet first?
That is exactly the determination I had to make when I was seven years old. It taught me a valuable lesson which was:
Sometimes the best way to face and, ultimately, conquer our fear is to ‘get wet’.
As you are thinking about this story, ask yourself what is preventing you from ‘taking the plunge’ to financial freedom?
Continue reading "Why Are You Afraid of Financial Freedom?" »
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Picture yourself five years from now … what do you want your personal finance picture to look like?
How much money will you have saved? What will your children have learned from you about financial planning? Where will you and your spouse or significant other be on the path to financial freedom?
These are all wonderful questions to ponder.
As you’ve probably figured out by reading several of my previous Keyboard-Culture blog posts, I’m a big believer in being the architect of your own reality. That’s how I’ve been able to achieve many of the things I’m proud of today.
Let me share a technique that has been proven to help people reach incredible levels of success. I call it creating a prosperity picture™.
Continue reading "The Fifth Financial Planning Step to Achieve Financial Freedom" »
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You’re intelligent enough to know that one of the easiest steps to financial planning is to get an accurate picture of where your money goes. Simply keep track of your spending for a month. That’s right. Grab a notebook or create a spreadsheet and put in everything that you’ve spent money on. Be honest, don’t be ashamed and do it.
After you’ve created this thirty day personal finance ‘lookback’, ask yourself this question:
“Where can I find money so I can get out of debt, invest and build wealth?"
If your answer is, I’m already maximizing my investment opportunities, then congratulations!
But if your answer is, "I’m living paycheck to paycheck and I don’t have extra money", allow me to introduce you to some of your money ‘thieves’.
Continue reading "The Fourth Financial Planning Step to Achieve Financial Freedom" »
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You probably already know this, but most of us use expressions that we’ve picked up from authority figures such as parents, celebrities or sports figures.
My mother had an interesting saying that I heard countless times while growing up. It was, “ … that is an up with which I will not put …”
Translated, it means: that is not acceptable to me and I won’t tolerate it.
As you sit there and read this blog post, ask yourself what you are allowing into your life that is not acceptable.
For example, are you tolerating:
• Too much credit card debt and not enough income?
• Too much job and not enough fulfillment?
• Too many personal finance arguments and not enough collaboration?
Continue reading "The Third Financial Planning Step to Achieve Financial Freedom" »
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I’ve always been fascinated by people and their perceptions of the world because their concepts and thoughts are reliable indicators and predictors of how they might be creating their realities.
For example, when I’m in the checkout line at my favorite grocery store, the cashier always greets me and asks whether I have found everything I need.
I’ll respond appropriately and then ask the individual about himself or herself. Often the answer I get is something like,”… I’ll be better in and hour and a half because that’s when I get off work …” or “… I can’t stand the weather … I wish it would stop raining …”
Since my life mission speaks to helping people achieve financial freedom and prosperity, I will generally offer a nugget or even a question in response.
Continue reading "The Second Financial Planning Step to Achieve Financial Freedom" »
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In my previous blog post I promised to teach you the steps to help you reprogram your Prosperity DNA™ so you can override the messages that will keep you stuck in wealth-reducing habits.
Throughout history many great thinkers have written and spoken about the mental maps, pictures and thoughts that ultimately determine the life we create for ourselves.
Here are but a few examples:
• “The mind is everything; what you think, you become.” – Buddha
• “We become what we contemplate.” – Plato
• “Change your thoughts and you change your world.” – Norman Vincent Peale
So what does this have to do with helping us to achieve our financial planning goals for financial freedom?
Continue reading "The First Financial Planning Step to Achieve Financial Freedom" »
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Yesterday I walked into a Barnes and Noble bookstore. I headed straight for Many of these printed works feature terrific suggestions about paying As I watched this human shopping frenzy grabbing personal finance books from Since eliminating credit card debt and building wealth for a millionaire
the personal finance section and started to count the different titles on the
shelves. I stopped counting after 73 because there were too many people in the
aisle and I couldn’t see the books clearly.
yourself first, spending less than you earn, investing, getting out of credit
card debt, building a millionaire retirement portfolio and more.
the shelf and leafing through the pages, several questions popped into my head.
retirement can be taught as a process and a system, why do so many people
continue to choose stress and vulnerability over happiness and security?
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Just picture yourself driving home from a business trip on a cold December Your cell phone rings but you don’t recognize the number displayed on the You’re puzzled because you didn’t bid for any items on the popular auction An hour and a half later, your cell phone rings again. Same story – By now your heart is starting to beat faster and your brain is working
day…
caller ID. You answer your phone and the caller exclaims that you’ve won his
online auction for a PlayStation 2™, and urges you to send him $450.00 that
afternoon so he can ship the item in time for Christmas.
site. You tell the caller you don’t know what he’s talking about, dismiss it as
a random event and hang up.
unfamiliar number and a caller telling you that, as the successful high bidder,
you need to send him hundreds of dollars immediately so he can ship you the
PlayStation 2™ in time for Christmas.
overtime trying to figure out what’s going on. After five more calls just like
the previous two, you start to panic because you know what happened…
Continue reading "How Identity Theft Can Ruin Your Drive Home" »
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Imagine what it would be like if you could take all the mistakes you’ve made Although we cannot change the past, periodically I take time to mentally And if you’ve read my Keyboard-Culture bio you’ll realize that I’ve lived Let me tell you about one of my personal finance choices that turned into a Sadly, my former wife and I didn’t communicate well about many things. Money
about personal finances and magically transform them into choices that produced
wealth …
review some of the decisions I’ve made and use them as lessons for the future.
through many of the same situations some of you are experiencing today.
no-win situation.
was just one of the items on the list. One Christmas she told me she wanted a
bicycle so she could pull our youngest child around the neighborhood in one of
those kiddie bike-seat attachments when the weather got warmer.
Continue reading "How to Learn From my Mistakes and Own the Power of Your Personal Finances" »
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It’s that time of year again ….. Christmas lights and decorations are It doesn’t matter what your beliefs or traditions are. The truth is the next What do plans and boundaries have to do with buying presents? Albert Einstein, one of the greatest thinkers in history, said that “a
beginning to pop up in your neighborhood, the only thing standing between you
and the mall entrance is the Salvation Army kettle and Adam Sandler’s “Hanukah
Song” can be heard blaring from car radio speakers across America.
several weeks can wreak havoc on your personal finances. Why? Because many of us
don’t have a spending plan in place for the holidays. And many of us equate
saying ‘no’ to depriving ourselves or our families of something we want.
problem cannot be solved at the level of consciousness in which it occurs …”
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This is the third post in a three part series dealing with the symptoms of living on the personal finance faultline:
7. Calls from bill collectors – neither caller ID nor voicemail will keep the collectors away. Some debts that have been turned over to collection agencies come with hefty fees that can substantially increase your balance. And if your payments are seriously past due, you could face legal action and wage garnishment in certain states.
8. Playing the float – some stores will let you write a check or swipe your debit card for an amount larger than your actual purchase, giving you cash back at the point of sale. If you do this repeatedly to cover a shortage of money until payday, it’s time to step back, take a deep breath and reevaluate your personal finance situation.
Continue reading "The Top Ten Ways to Tell if You Need a Personal Finance Life Preserver" »
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Here is the second section of a three part post
focusing on ways to tell if you or someone you know is in personal finance
purgatory: 4. Can’t pay your bills – this means there’s not
enough money coming in or too much money going out every month. Look at yourself
in the mirror and ask, “How did I get into this situation?” Be honest and take
responsibility. That’s the very first step to changing things. Make a commitment
to fix the problem and change the self-sabotaging behavior. For example, by
cutting out the fancy coffee and muffin every morning at work and the two
cocktails on your way home, you could save nearly $200.00 a month! How would
that affect your personal finance picture?
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As promised in my previous post, here are some of the warning signs that you or someone you know is drowning in debt:
1. Credit cards are maxed out – remember that a credit card balance is a loan that must be repaid. And the interest you’re paying for the convenience of paying with plastic is costing you money every month you maintain a balance. Many of us get into credit card chaos because we can’t afford the items we charge. Ideally, a credit card should be used for an emergency. If you prefer plastic to paper, use a debit card. That way you’ll be paying with money you have instead of using the bank’s funds that must be repaid with interest.
Continue reading "The Top Ten Ways to Tell if You Need a Personal Finance Life Preserver" »
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Do you snicker at other people when they talk about a household budget? Is each week a personal finance nail-biter until the next payday? Do you panic when the bills arrive in your mailbox? Do you frequently borrow money from family and friends because you never seem to have enough of your own?
If this sounds like you or someone you know, keep reading. Think about the people you know whose lives are a personal finance fiasco. Those difficulties could be the result of behavior that’s masking a deeper set of problems.
Continue reading "Does This Behavior Make My Debt Look Too Big?" »
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Hi there, my name is Marc Woolf.
My goal is simple: to help you own the power of your personal finances so you can retire a millionaire.
We probably haven’t met, but I know thousands of you already. I’ve been where many of you are right now. I’ve had screaming matches with my spouse about personal finances, sweated paying the bills every month and made personal finance choices that cost me thousands of dollars in credit card interest. And I did it several times.
I’m not making excuses for the way I handled my personal finances. Neither should you. That was in the past.
What I do know is you can take control and, as a result, live a happier, less stressful and a more fulfilling life and retire a millionaire.
I’m here to support you on your personal finance journey, and I’ve dedicated this blog to all of you who want to own the power of your personal finances.
I look forward to your feedback and comments.
Own the power of your personal finances and retire a millionaire!
Marc Woolf
Blog Posts Copyright © Marc S. Woolf 2007 All rights reserved.
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Personal finance expert Marc Woolf helps people own the power of their personal finances so they can retire millionaires.
His Debt Burner Blueprint™ features simple, effective and proven techniques to help you dig out of debt quickly. Marc Woolf’s enthusiasm is fueled by a strong desire to assist individuals and families who are committed to achieving extraordinary personal finance results.
Laced with his astute observations and firsthand experiences, the system Marc Woolf developed for building financial fitness has evolved from many years of research into how people have cracked the “cashflow code.”
Marc Woolf is an engaging teacher for people who are ready to take control of their personal finances so they can retire millionaires.
Marc’s personal story and how Marc Woolf has become an expert in the area of personal finance is remarkable and inspiring.
The son of highly educated parents, Marc Woolf quickly learned that getting a good education topped the family’s priority list. However, financial literacy wasn’t even on the radar.
As a result, his Financial DNA™ was programmed for accumulating debt instead of building wealth. The die had been cast. Marc Woolf became a “serial debtor,” and he racked up thousands of dollars in credit card debt several times.
Marc’s personal relationships suffered severely because of personal finance arguments. He was nearly bankrupt monetarily and spiritually.
After several “wake-up calls,” Marc Woolf stared at himself in life’s full length mirror. He decided to change his inner thoughts about himself and his relationship with money, so the outer world he was experiencing would improve.
In the process, Marc Woolf developed specific strategies focused on building wealth and eliminating debt so he could retire a millionaire. He became a walking example of how the power of conscious thought can transform reality.
Fortunately for his audiences, Marc Woolf became relentless in his passion to help others own the power of their personal finances, and today, he is a sought after expert in the areas of:
• Personal finance
• Money management
• How to cure credit card addiction
• The power of a spending plan
• How to pay yourself first
• How to retire a millionaire
Marc Woolf has a B.S. in Speech Communication from the State University of New York.
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