The Cure For Greed

Interesting, isn’t it, how all that seems to be good about the holiday season recently incepted also seems to be accompanied by something… less than good?  Along with the bountiful feast on Thanksgiving comes the gluttony of eating like animals preparing for hibernation.  Along with the tradition of competitive college and professional football comes the sloth of watching three games… back-to-back… in the same spot… on the same couch.  And along with the season of giving comes the season of frenzied consumption, driven by marketing that at times seems downright manipulative.

Please don’t perceive my tone as judgmental; I only used the examples mentioned because they are those temptations to which I am most susceptible.  I am not a member of the naturally frugal minority condemning the profligate materialistic majority.  It is, after all, my tendency to prefer more over less, better over worse, cool over dorky and hip over unfashionable.

So it is with humility, then, that I posit this “Cure for Greed,” learned quite unintentionally through an experience many years ago that helps me avoid succumbing to the tug of materialism, an enticement we all face daily:

Selfish Generosity

The-art-of-non-conformity-set-your-own-rules-live-the-life-you-want-and-change-the-world Chris Guillebeau is an interesting dude.  I had the chance to hang out with him recently when he was stopping in Baltimore on his book tour in support of his new book, The Art of Non-Conformity, and I interviewed Chris on the radio show, Money, Riches & Wealth.  In case you’ve never heard of Chris and require a little more buy-in to believe he’s worthy of the “interesting” label, my summary following should do the trick:

Chris quit high-school after his freshman year, got his GED, snuck into community college, finished hisundergrad degree in 2 years (your math is correct—at that point, he wouldn’t have even finished high school ordinarily), served with an aid organization in Africa for several years, came back to the states to complete grad school, began to blog, became a professional writer and then wrote a book including a chapter in which he calculates to the penny how he could’ve gotten more education for far less outside of grad school rather than in.

You might expect this rebel with a cause to be a loud, type-A, bull-in-a-china-shop sort, but I was somewhat surprised to learn he’s actually a soft-spoken introvert.  That hasn’t stopped him from communicating a truck-load of wisdom, certainly through his book, The Art of Non-Conformity, but even more so through his online presence (which you can enjoy at www.chrisguillebeau.com).

And here’s the most interesting thing about Chris and his vision that separates him from the vast majority of vocational self-help voices:

He doesn’t think it’s all about YOU (or him or me).

Way too many books—most glaringly, The Secret—have attempted to make us followers by courting us with self-centric pronouncements that WE are each the center of a universe that is waiting to dutifully serve us all the success and money we could dream of if we simply dedicate our every thought and action to that “reality.”   Mr. Guillebeau, on the other hand, sends a strikingly non-hedonistic message.  Sure, he believes that we should be enjoying nearly every minute of our education and job, but instead of attracting us with visions of living endless hours with our toes in the sand and a fruity umbrella drink in hand, he encourages us to live a life filled with purpose and work that may be enriching, but definitely fulfilling.

He believes that in order for us to be entirely fulfilled with our life’s work, we need to be serving someone other than ourselves; that we—regardless of our age—must be building a legacy, not just an estate.  He calls it “selfish generosity.”  Doing something good for others that is also good for you.  If you struggle to believe that one can find financial stability, or even affluence, by pursuing a vocational course that doesn’t seek first and always to serve oneself, take a look at, well, Chris.  Or, have some fun learning about Blake Mycoskie, the young entrepreneur who started a phenomenally successful, for-profit shoe company—TOMS Shoes—on the premise that they would give away one pair of shoes for every pair sold. One-for-one.

Aw, I don’t know…the whole greed-centered focus worked out so well in the Great Recession, though! (Sorry, I’m obviously struggling with my 2010 New Year’s Resolution to avoid the use of sarcasm…)

Listen to just a few minutes of my interview with Chris Guillebeau on this topic by clicking here:

 

Chris Inteview

 

 

How Do I Choose The Right Financial Planner?

Magnifying-glass-2[1] I had the opportunity recently to work with some great folks at the Journal of Medical Practice Management.  They had been exposed to The Financial Crossroads and asked if I would write an article to be published in their offering to doctors and medical practice managers.  The topic? How to choose the right financial planner.  Which, incidentally, became the title of the article.

As I reviewed the article prior to publication, I realized that although the article was initially geared towards those in the medical realm, the education is indeed quite universal.  Furthermore, there has never been a time at which so many people have been asking the questions in my lifetime: “How do I know how to choose the right financial advisor? Who can I trust?  How can I verify?”

So I was very pleased when I found out that the Journal of Medical Practice Management had licensed an online outfit to reproduce some of its articles, allowing me to share it with you and anyone you know who might be asking the question, “How do I choose the right financial planner?

Read the entire article now by clicking HERE!

Wag The Dog

Let’s face it: the topic of taxes is just… plain… boring!  Boring, but IMPORTANT.  Here’s the most important rule to remember about taxes in your personal financial planning in the least boring way I could muster.

From The Financial Crossroads Chapter Thirteen of, Wag the Dog:

There is an alien in our house.  Even though we willingly invited this being into our midst when it was very young, it’s become abundantly clear that it does not fully understand the cultural norms of the human realm.  For example, when left to its own devices, it will pillage our human food stores even though it subsists on its own specialized alien food.  It seeks to re-create the style and substance of our outdoor landscaping by relocating the dirt and mulch of our purposefully designed flower beds onto our sidewalks, and creating anew trenches and holes in parts of our yard that were previously flat and covered with grass.  And despite our munificent creation of an alien habitat inside of our home, it seeks to live in, and often bring destruction to, our human habitat, furniture, and creature comforts.  It’s…a dog.

Tim’s dog can’t catch a Frisbee with her mouth, but tries with her paws!

She is, as much as it pains me to say it, our dog, and unless she hears Jack London’s Call of the Wild, she will be for quite some time because she’s still only a puppy.  She was a shelter puppy—an adorable, lovable mix between a German Shorthaired Pointer and a Labrador Retriever (at best guess).  An especially strong case can be made for the pointer, because as she grew, she became so tall and lanky that her youthful coordination simply couldn’t keep up with her growth.  The result was an hysterical few months of physical comedy.

After a February winter storm, she looked like Bambi scrambling to find her footing on the ice-covered snow.  If she made it up a flight of stairs, she’d have to be carried down to avoid tumbling over her stilt-like legs.  And her tail grew to a point where it seemed to double her overall length.  That tail is a weapon capable of clearing off an entire coffee table.  And she’s so annoyingly happy that her tail is always in motion.  I have, on more than one occasion, seen her lose control of her overjoyed tail, collapsing her entire awkward frame into a heap on the floor.

“Don’t let the tax tail wag the dog.”  In college, I heard that quote for the first time from the professor that made the greatest impact on me in those years, Dr. Daniel Singer.  He was—and is—that professor that unnerves students because he’s not predictable.  One semester, he’d teach a class with three tests and two quizzes in between; the next semester, your entire grade was based on only one presentation.  But it was his unpredictability, his passion, and his depth of conviction that drew me to him, and I aimed to take as many of his classes as possible.  It is now my privilege to teach alongside Dr. Singer as an adjunct faculty member at the university from which I graduated.

Dr. Singer would not claim to have been the first ever to say, “Don’t let the tax tail wag the dog,” but to me, in my junior year of college, it was groundbreaking, and it still is.  Too many people, too often, make poor economic decisions because their judgment is clouded by tax concerns.  In most financial decisions, the tax consequences are a secondary or tertiary—at best—consideration.  Drew Tignanelli, a Certified Public Accountant and Certified Financial Planner™ practitioner with 30 years of experience balancing tax planning within the framework of good financial planning put it to me this way: “First, forget about taxes!”

How could he make such a claim?  It’s not because he sees taxes or tax planning as irrelevant or unimportant.  He simply recognizes that in the realm of personal financial planning, you should make decisions first based on the wisdom of the investment, insurance, retirement, or estate planning strategy, and then take a look at the taxes.