Fortune Watch

“Self-Made in America” a book by John McCormack, suggests that if you are investing less than 25% of your income then you aren’t serious about becoming wealthy. But how do you afford to do this without suffering? The answer is here.

You can do this by eliminating waste and impulse spending from your spending habits. Studies have shown that the average person blows around 25% of their income in these two totally unnecessary areas; waste spend and impulse spending. Let’s see what these two types of unnecessary spending are and how to eliminate them.

First I will define waste spending. There are two main types of waste. Firstly waste is when you spend more money than you need to in order to get the result that you want. Secondly waste is when you buy more than you need in order to get the result that you want.

Here are two examples around food.

An example of Type 1 Waste would be buying a sandwich for lunch for $5 when you could have made the same sandwich at home, and brought it with you, for only 50 cents. You are paying ten times the true value of that sandwich by buying it ready made. You probably also spent more time standing in line to be served than the time you would have required to make the sandwich at home.

An example of Type 2 Waste is when you buy more food than you need and then have to throw it away. Because you couldn’t be bothered taking the time to calculate the amount that you really needed you overspent on your food bill.

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The other day I read an amazing statistic? It said that as many as half the people who end up divorced had a strong feeling before the wedding that they were doing the wrong thing but they were too embarrassed to pull out at the last minute. The fear of embarrassment is a powerful influence in the lives of most people.

Imagine that you slipped over in a public street, what would your first reaction be? If you are like most people you would look around to see who saw you.

Another, well known, statistic is that fear of public speaking is the number one fear that people have, but is it true? I suggest that their fear of public speaking is really a fear of being embarrassed publicly if they mess up.

So what’s all this got to do with being broke?

In order to become wealthy you need to set a goal to become wealthy. Since having lots of money is a lot more fun than being broke why doesn’t everyone set a serious goal to be rich? The reason is that they are afraid of the embarrassment if they tell everyone that they are going to be rich and then they fail.

It seems crazy to let your life be controlled by the fear of what other people may think of you, yet that is exactly what most people are doing. What about you? Are you letting the fear of embarrassment keep you from reaching your full potential, financially or otherwise?

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