Stuck in a Lifetime of the Money Game
Back in time, decades ago, I never thought much about money. I knew that my family was not rich, but I also knew that we were not poor. We went on family vacations, we almost always ate a home-prepared dinner as a family, our house was not huge but big enough (bigger than my own family’s house now by about 500 square feet), we had working vehicles and my father worked like a dog. My mother worked as well as an English teacher including at local colleges, which helps explain my aptitude and writing skills, even more so when I eventually divulge who my father was. Let’s just say that I never questioned class issues. We knew who we were and I never knew how much my parents made, but knew that it was enough.
I was born and raised in the middle class, fluctuating from its lowest extreme, perilously close to the free lunch status that most of the minority children in my elementary school received, and we did go nearly a full winter once without a working vehicle, requiring my mother to borrow cars and take the bus to make it to work or do our grocery shopping. That was decades before the Internet and Peapod and Peapod-like services existed.
Drones may have been shown in the Jetson’s, a space-age cartoon that I watched as a kid, but you could not order a cheap one online at Amazon or hundreds of other websites.
Decades later, I remain solidly in the middle of the middle class as measured by our family’s income, where we live, where we travel, how we save money for the future, products and services that we purchase and use and in nearly every way imaginable. I have read dozens of “How to Tell if You Are Middle Class” articles, some of which I intend to post about in the future, but you will just have to trust me for now, I am a middle class mensch and I am the primary breadwinner for my middle class family.
Busting Loose
For many years, I along with millions of others have dreamed of “busting loose,” of reaching my full potential, fulfilling my dreams, putting my skills and abilities to their best use. Perhaps writing, like this little unknown blog or e-books or perhaps even a “real” book that you would purchase and hold in your hand, like the books that I read.
I also have a great deal of interest and knowledge on financial matters, but that was gained after college, not before. Had you asked me at the UW in my late teens if I had any interest in finance, I would have told you to f*ck off and then laughed about it. I was far more artistic and creative back then, not yet pounded into submission by a series of difficult jobs and challenges through life but, then again, that is part of growing up.
Like my late, wise grandfather always said, “I will complain on the thirty-second of the month.”
My growing readership knows that I am an avid reader and spent much of 2016 and 2017 reading books in what I have coined the “Change Your Way of Thinking/Improve Your Life/Become Wealthy” genre of books that has proliferated in the past few decades.
I once thought these types of books for the weak-minded and kind of fruity, truth be told. After all, my father’s father pulled himself up from having no family and deep poverty in the Great Depression as a child, to a corporate VP accountant who lived a decidedly upper-middle-class life of a fully-owned home in a decidedly upscale north shore suburb, fine dining, new vehicles, traveling with his wife and family and lived to 100 years old without ever consulting a book on how to lift himself up.
Of course, only a few such books (which I have read) like Think And Grow Rich
by Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People
existed in those days. Furthermore, when you work labor-intensive jobs for decades and live in a SRO in the not-so-nice parts of Chicago, it is unlikely that you will have the time and inclination to obtain a library card, much less travel to the library to obtain such a book. He was much more interested in reading the introduction to accounting books required by his City College evening classes that he took a few times per week.
His life story would make a great movie.
So when I saw the title Busting Loose From the Money Game: Mind-Blowing Strategies for Changing the Rules of a Game You Can't Win by Robert Scheinfeld, a 2006 book by Robert Scheinfeld at the Goodwill for $1.79 last year, I had to buy and read it. As the cover suggests, it gave me some hope to learn some "mind-blowing strategies for changing the rules of a game you can't win."
I am very glad that this was not the first such book that I read on the topic, or it would have strongly reinforced my preconceived notion of the fruitiness of such books, pardon the expression. If someone ever faked it to make a million bucks off of a book, this is a prime example.
Like all books, I did have key takeaways from reading it this past summer, which I will now share with you.
Preconceived Notions. Early on, Scheinfeld, like many others in this “genre” claims that middle class people like me and perhaps you too suffer from rules, regulations and structure points that we have been taught are “real” as we play the money game throughout our lives. Actually, I am experiencing many of these issues this week, as I strive to pay holiday bills, tuition payments, homeowner’s insurance and on and on.
He lists many such commonly-held notions, one of which are that there is a limited supply of money available to you. Therefore, when it “goes out,” your supply decreases. Others that he lists and that I have and will always consider truisms are that (1) you must work harder or smarter to increase your supply of money; (2) you must control money or it will control you; (3) some people have the money-making skill and others do not; (4) net worth is the true measure of wealth and success; (5) you must save for a rainy day and (6) more money is always better.
Why We Can’t Win the “Money Game.” Scheinfeld makes the great point that there is no clear definition of winning. If I think that making $250K per year would be great and would solve all of life’s problems now, if you were to ask someone in that income bracket, they have many of the same stresses that you or I have. They may think that their problems would disappear if they made $500K and so on and so forth. I do not consider them having “won,” but I sure do consider their lifestyles enviable.
He also writes that your money is always at risk. Even millionaires suffer the risk of losing much or all of their wealth through poor management, embezzlement, overspending, a stock market crash, theft, divorce, business failures, tragic accidents and on and on. He also mentions that there is no ending point. Even retirees and older folks are always at risk of losing what they have accumulated. He asks when the “money game” ends. When you die? His final point on the matter is that there is always a price to pay. Scheinfeld writes that even if you make a ton of money, invest it well, grow your net worth and live the lifestyle that us money mensches envy, playing the “money game” well always leads to some very intense form of stress, pressure, dissatisfaction, pain or loss including your free time, health and relationships.
Money is in Limited Supply and It Moves. Scheinfeld’s book has gone off the more regular path by Chapter 7, having his readers imagine that they live a hologram-type life when it comes to finances, but he does make the salient point that the supply of money available to you and the world is actually unlimited. He writes that when you spend money, you do not actually have less. It is just some numbers on your computer screen that move around. He claims that profits, income and expenses are not real. We are living with illusions of movement, gain and loss to convince ourselves that it is real but, once again, it is more like an illusion in a hologram.
If that is indeed the case, I sure wish that more money would move into my illusion/hologram and less would move out. He forgets that these numbers represent the power to purchase goods and services, which I contend are not holograms. Like I said, a little “fruity,”
Work Harder or Smarter. I am a big believer of working smarter rather than harder. I have a great example of an attorney who I am very close with, who told me that he received a settlement for a client by writing a letter that took him less than an hour, gaining him a $30,000 commission. In the many books that I have read this year, I have not heard of too many authors who claimed such a large amount for so little effort.
This same person sometimes spends years and considerable amounts of his own funds without winning or settling other cases, so that $30K deal was an anomaly, but I still think of how hard some lower middle-class guys must have to work, possibly an entire year, to make that same amount. They work harder, but not smarter.
Also, it is not as if you or I could write the same letter (unless you are an attorney too) detailing the injuries caused to our client by the company that quickly settled before the suit was filed and brought to light. Also, it would be wrong to diminish the hard work and massive amount of debt that this attorney took on to become an attorney, as well as the years of hard knocks taken while working for others. In other words, many years of hard work and training came before the quick thirty grand made as a share of a $100,000 settlement.
Scheinfeld claims that the notions that everything costs you, that you have to work for money, that you have to earn it and that making money is a skill that some have and others do not are all false. Again, he writes that you and I can “pop any pattern into [our] hologram…and have anything you want.” You can create the illusion of having everything, “since all money comes from you and a pattern in The Field.” Seriously?!
Expenses Don’t Exist. Scheinfeld writes that expenses and income do not exist. Profits, bills, invoices, accounts receivable and accounts payable do not exist. Your checkbook and investments do not exist. The numbers in those accounts do not exist, and are “all just holographic illusions.”
Abundance is who you and I really are and is our natural state. Money is easily created in any amount and from any source. A great example is the few dollars flowing to me from writing about books that I have read and posting them on my blog. Later, I will publish them together in one or more e-books, again creating some funds from thin air, or from pixels on a screen stored in a remote server. The way I look at it is different, though, considering that I spend a lot of time and energy on this blog, all to make a small percentage of what I earn hourly at my day job. I do not agree with his notion that the above do not exist, but perhaps that is what keeps people like us working hard to keep making ends meet.
The Hologram and the Egg. I am a fairly smart guy. College educated, master’s degree, over twenty years of work experience, certified and well-respected in my field. I have read thousands of books and can hold my own with nearly anybody on a wide variety of topics (although I try to avoid religion and politics). Thus, when I read the sentence “…if your Expanded Self doesn’t create a pattern in the Field that matches what you appear [author’s italics] to be thinking, visualizing, or affirming, and add enormous power to it, it can’t pop into your hologram,” I should have thrown this book in the garbage.
However, I was determined to learn something from it, having invested nearly two dollars! Could I pay my mortgage and my monthly payment to our son’s college and our property tax payment this month by make believe money in my hologram? I should ask our lender, his college and the county treasurer. The author ends Chapter 8 by plugging how to bust loose from the money game at www.bustingloose.com. Apparently, that site no longer exists here in 2018, but kicks you over to where you can read all of this gobbledygook at his eponymously named www.robertscheinfeld.com.
Put Your Foot on the Gas. Chapter 10 gives some advice to jump into the driver’s seat and get ready for a fast and wild ride into overcoming your participation in “the money game.” He calls this The Process, which is designed “to support you in reclaiming power from the eggs in the Field that have been limiting you (including financially). It is designed to move you out of the Money Game permanently," and if you believe that, would you like to purchase some lovely land I know about in Florida?
There is some good touchy/feely kind of stuff in this chapter, if you believe that you can release your “Infinite Being who’s in a constant state of joyfulness, peace and unconditional love for everything and everyone.” Perhaps I should write a book like his, because I could make that shit up with the best of anybody. Maybe I will.
Panic and Terror. Apparently Scheinfeld must have made a lot of money writing and speaking about this stuff. He makes a good point in Chapter 12, "Postcards from the Road," in which he describes the panic and terror that he felt when his business was failing years ago and he adopted "The Process" to right himself. He writes about walking around his dream home and outside "on the grounds" taking in all the beautiful scenery and views (this is not my or your neighborhood) and imagining having to give it all up if the hemorrhaging of money continued.
He continued applying this Process of his, imagining everything to be a giant hologram up to four hours per day when he was feeling intense fear or panic. He would go through this fruity (and nutty) process repeatedly until he realized that his core belief about the abundance of his earning ability was tied to his business skills in marketing and making things happen. In the author's case, it must have worked out well because he has made a very nice living off of this by selling books and making appearances. I was going to add his podcasts as a money-making venture, but I just found them all for free.
The Busting Loose Point. In Chapter 13, Scheinfeld describes what we all want and aspire to, "The Busting Loose Point." This is the point that I aspire to but feel that I will never reach. Most people will never reach theirs, or even aspire to. This is the point when you have collapsed the foundational patterns that your middle class thinking has kept you locked into, and you have expanded and opened to the Infinite Abundance that is your natural state. This is what we dream of - when all of your dreams and talents coalesce into something that you were born for, are great at, and customers, buyers and everyone flocks to you. They purchase your products or services. They buy your books. They click on the ads on your blog. They subscribe monthly to read what you write. They pay money to hear you speak or to consult with them.
At that moment, Scheinfeld writes, "you know - at a very deep and profound level - you're creating absolutely everything you experience." At this point, he writes in fruitier and nuttier language than the other books that I have read, that "numbers aren't real, money isn't real, accounts aren't real, the apparent flow of money through your hologram isn't real, and your natural state of Infinite Abundance is real."
Suffice it to say, even though there were some interesting points in Scheinfeld's book and it definitely justified the two bucks that I paid for it last year, I am glad to be moving it along.
For now, my dear readers, I am hopelessly stuck in the middle of and far from Busting Loose From the Money Game.
Thanks for reading.
Back in time, decades ago, I never thought much about money. I knew that my family was not rich, but I also knew that we were not poor. We went on family vacations, we almost always ate a home-prepared dinner as a family, our house was not huge but big enough (bigger than my own family’s house now by about 500 square feet), we had working vehicles and my father worked like a dog. My mother worked as well as an English teacher including at local colleges, which helps explain my aptitude and writing skills, even more so when I eventually divulge who my father was. Let’s just say that I never questioned class issues. We knew who we were and I never knew how much my parents made, but knew that it was enough.
I was born and raised in the middle class, fluctuating from its lowest extreme, perilously close to the free lunch status that most of the minority children in my elementary school received, and we did go nearly a full winter once without a working vehicle, requiring my mother to borrow cars and take the bus to make it to work or do our grocery shopping. That was decades before the Internet and Peapod and Peapod-like services existed.
Drones may have been shown in the Jetson’s, a space-age cartoon that I watched as a kid, but you could not order a cheap one online at Amazon or hundreds of other websites.
 |
| George Jetson at work, not unlike me at my job today. |
Busting Loose
For many years, I along with millions of others have dreamed of “busting loose,” of reaching my full potential, fulfilling my dreams, putting my skills and abilities to their best use. Perhaps writing, like this little unknown blog or e-books or perhaps even a “real” book that you would purchase and hold in your hand, like the books that I read.
I also have a great deal of interest and knowledge on financial matters, but that was gained after college, not before. Had you asked me at the UW in my late teens if I had any interest in finance, I would have told you to f*ck off and then laughed about it. I was far more artistic and creative back then, not yet pounded into submission by a series of difficult jobs and challenges through life but, then again, that is part of growing up.
Like my late, wise grandfather always said, “I will complain on the thirty-second of the month.”
My growing readership knows that I am an avid reader and spent much of 2016 and 2017 reading books in what I have coined the “Change Your Way of Thinking/Improve Your Life/Become Wealthy” genre of books that has proliferated in the past few decades.
I once thought these types of books for the weak-minded and kind of fruity, truth be told. After all, my father’s father pulled himself up from having no family and deep poverty in the Great Depression as a child, to a corporate VP accountant who lived a decidedly upper-middle-class life of a fully-owned home in a decidedly upscale north shore suburb, fine dining, new vehicles, traveling with his wife and family and lived to 100 years old without ever consulting a book on how to lift himself up.
Of course, only a few such books (which I have read) like Think And Grow Rich
by Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People
existed in those days. Furthermore, when you work labor-intensive jobs for decades and live in a SRO in the not-so-nice parts of Chicago, it is unlikely that you will have the time and inclination to obtain a library card, much less travel to the library to obtain such a book. He was much more interested in reading the introduction to accounting books required by his City College evening classes that he took a few times per week.His life story would make a great movie.
So when I saw the title Busting Loose From the Money Game: Mind-Blowing Strategies for Changing the Rules of a Game You Can't Win by Robert Scheinfeld, a 2006 book by Robert Scheinfeld at the Goodwill for $1.79 last year, I had to buy and read it. As the cover suggests, it gave me some hope to learn some "mind-blowing strategies for changing the rules of a game you can't win."
I am very glad that this was not the first such book that I read on the topic, or it would have strongly reinforced my preconceived notion of the fruitiness of such books, pardon the expression. If someone ever faked it to make a million bucks off of a book, this is a prime example.
Like all books, I did have key takeaways from reading it this past summer, which I will now share with you.
Preconceived Notions. Early on, Scheinfeld, like many others in this “genre” claims that middle class people like me and perhaps you too suffer from rules, regulations and structure points that we have been taught are “real” as we play the money game throughout our lives. Actually, I am experiencing many of these issues this week, as I strive to pay holiday bills, tuition payments, homeowner’s insurance and on and on.
He lists many such commonly-held notions, one of which are that there is a limited supply of money available to you. Therefore, when it “goes out,” your supply decreases. Others that he lists and that I have and will always consider truisms are that (1) you must work harder or smarter to increase your supply of money; (2) you must control money or it will control you; (3) some people have the money-making skill and others do not; (4) net worth is the true measure of wealth and success; (5) you must save for a rainy day and (6) more money is always better.
Why We Can’t Win the “Money Game.” Scheinfeld makes the great point that there is no clear definition of winning. If I think that making $250K per year would be great and would solve all of life’s problems now, if you were to ask someone in that income bracket, they have many of the same stresses that you or I have. They may think that their problems would disappear if they made $500K and so on and so forth. I do not consider them having “won,” but I sure do consider their lifestyles enviable.
He also writes that your money is always at risk. Even millionaires suffer the risk of losing much or all of their wealth through poor management, embezzlement, overspending, a stock market crash, theft, divorce, business failures, tragic accidents and on and on. He also mentions that there is no ending point. Even retirees and older folks are always at risk of losing what they have accumulated. He asks when the “money game” ends. When you die? His final point on the matter is that there is always a price to pay. Scheinfeld writes that even if you make a ton of money, invest it well, grow your net worth and live the lifestyle that us money mensches envy, playing the “money game” well always leads to some very intense form of stress, pressure, dissatisfaction, pain or loss including your free time, health and relationships.
Money is in Limited Supply and It Moves. Scheinfeld’s book has gone off the more regular path by Chapter 7, having his readers imagine that they live a hologram-type life when it comes to finances, but he does make the salient point that the supply of money available to you and the world is actually unlimited. He writes that when you spend money, you do not actually have less. It is just some numbers on your computer screen that move around. He claims that profits, income and expenses are not real. We are living with illusions of movement, gain and loss to convince ourselves that it is real but, once again, it is more like an illusion in a hologram.
If that is indeed the case, I sure wish that more money would move into my illusion/hologram and less would move out. He forgets that these numbers represent the power to purchase goods and services, which I contend are not holograms. Like I said, a little “fruity,”
Work Harder or Smarter. I am a big believer of working smarter rather than harder. I have a great example of an attorney who I am very close with, who told me that he received a settlement for a client by writing a letter that took him less than an hour, gaining him a $30,000 commission. In the many books that I have read this year, I have not heard of too many authors who claimed such a large amount for so little effort.
This same person sometimes spends years and considerable amounts of his own funds without winning or settling other cases, so that $30K deal was an anomaly, but I still think of how hard some lower middle-class guys must have to work, possibly an entire year, to make that same amount. They work harder, but not smarter.
Also, it is not as if you or I could write the same letter (unless you are an attorney too) detailing the injuries caused to our client by the company that quickly settled before the suit was filed and brought to light. Also, it would be wrong to diminish the hard work and massive amount of debt that this attorney took on to become an attorney, as well as the years of hard knocks taken while working for others. In other words, many years of hard work and training came before the quick thirty grand made as a share of a $100,000 settlement.
Scheinfeld claims that the notions that everything costs you, that you have to work for money, that you have to earn it and that making money is a skill that some have and others do not are all false. Again, he writes that you and I can “pop any pattern into [our] hologram…and have anything you want.” You can create the illusion of having everything, “since all money comes from you and a pattern in The Field.” Seriously?!
Expenses Don’t Exist. Scheinfeld writes that expenses and income do not exist. Profits, bills, invoices, accounts receivable and accounts payable do not exist. Your checkbook and investments do not exist. The numbers in those accounts do not exist, and are “all just holographic illusions.”
Abundance is who you and I really are and is our natural state. Money is easily created in any amount and from any source. A great example is the few dollars flowing to me from writing about books that I have read and posting them on my blog. Later, I will publish them together in one or more e-books, again creating some funds from thin air, or from pixels on a screen stored in a remote server. The way I look at it is different, though, considering that I spend a lot of time and energy on this blog, all to make a small percentage of what I earn hourly at my day job. I do not agree with his notion that the above do not exist, but perhaps that is what keeps people like us working hard to keep making ends meet.
The Hologram and the Egg. I am a fairly smart guy. College educated, master’s degree, over twenty years of work experience, certified and well-respected in my field. I have read thousands of books and can hold my own with nearly anybody on a wide variety of topics (although I try to avoid religion and politics). Thus, when I read the sentence “…if your Expanded Self doesn’t create a pattern in the Field that matches what you appear [author’s italics] to be thinking, visualizing, or affirming, and add enormous power to it, it can’t pop into your hologram,” I should have thrown this book in the garbage.
However, I was determined to learn something from it, having invested nearly two dollars! Could I pay my mortgage and my monthly payment to our son’s college and our property tax payment this month by make believe money in my hologram? I should ask our lender, his college and the county treasurer. The author ends Chapter 8 by plugging how to bust loose from the money game at www.bustingloose.com. Apparently, that site no longer exists here in 2018, but kicks you over to where you can read all of this gobbledygook at his eponymously named www.robertscheinfeld.com.
Put Your Foot on the Gas. Chapter 10 gives some advice to jump into the driver’s seat and get ready for a fast and wild ride into overcoming your participation in “the money game.” He calls this The Process, which is designed “to support you in reclaiming power from the eggs in the Field that have been limiting you (including financially). It is designed to move you out of the Money Game permanently," and if you believe that, would you like to purchase some lovely land I know about in Florida?
There is some good touchy/feely kind of stuff in this chapter, if you believe that you can release your “Infinite Being who’s in a constant state of joyfulness, peace and unconditional love for everything and everyone.” Perhaps I should write a book like his, because I could make that shit up with the best of anybody. Maybe I will.
Panic and Terror. Apparently Scheinfeld must have made a lot of money writing and speaking about this stuff. He makes a good point in Chapter 12, "Postcards from the Road," in which he describes the panic and terror that he felt when his business was failing years ago and he adopted "The Process" to right himself. He writes about walking around his dream home and outside "on the grounds" taking in all the beautiful scenery and views (this is not my or your neighborhood) and imagining having to give it all up if the hemorrhaging of money continued.
He continued applying this Process of his, imagining everything to be a giant hologram up to four hours per day when he was feeling intense fear or panic. He would go through this fruity (and nutty) process repeatedly until he realized that his core belief about the abundance of his earning ability was tied to his business skills in marketing and making things happen. In the author's case, it must have worked out well because he has made a very nice living off of this by selling books and making appearances. I was going to add his podcasts as a money-making venture, but I just found them all for free.
The Busting Loose Point. In Chapter 13, Scheinfeld describes what we all want and aspire to, "The Busting Loose Point." This is the point that I aspire to but feel that I will never reach. Most people will never reach theirs, or even aspire to. This is the point when you have collapsed the foundational patterns that your middle class thinking has kept you locked into, and you have expanded and opened to the Infinite Abundance that is your natural state. This is what we dream of - when all of your dreams and talents coalesce into something that you were born for, are great at, and customers, buyers and everyone flocks to you. They purchase your products or services. They buy your books. They click on the ads on your blog. They subscribe monthly to read what you write. They pay money to hear you speak or to consult with them.
At that moment, Scheinfeld writes, "you know - at a very deep and profound level - you're creating absolutely everything you experience." At this point, he writes in fruitier and nuttier language than the other books that I have read, that "numbers aren't real, money isn't real, accounts aren't real, the apparent flow of money through your hologram isn't real, and your natural state of Infinite Abundance is real."
 |
For now, my dear readers, I am hopelessly stuck in the middle of and far from Busting Loose From the Money Game.
Thanks for reading.
Comments
Post a Comment