Learning to control the soul inside your wallet

Sometimes I think my wallet has a mind of it’s own. When I’m in a store or I’m surfing the Internet and I come across something I would really like to purchase it’s almost as if my wallet will jump out of my back pocket. Are you like this too? I’ll be the first to admit that I have always had a spending problem. Like a lot of other people I know, I have spent the majority of my life spending more than I actually make.

I always tell my friends that I’m on my third life. When they ask why, I say it’s because three times in my life I’ve went from everything to nothing. The sad fact is that each time I did it to myself. I’ve always been a person of little patience, so when I see something I want to buy I usually just buy it without regard as to how I will pay for it. Those little plastic cards make it very convenient for impulse buyers.

My compulsive behavior didn’t stop at regular everyday items either. When I started my Internet business I convinced myself to make purchased that I justified in my mind as being “For the business”. When in reality I was still being compulsive. I spent thousands of dollars on ebooks, tutorials, and training programs that were all not worth the time it took someone to write them in the first place. I guess now I could say it was all a learning experience but that would be a lie. Had I done the proper research before purchasing those items I would have seen through the scams and lies.

Today I try to live a different life when I am dealing with money. I have learned a couple very nice tricks that help to keep my wallet in my pants. Believe me I have been down and out more than once in my life. I have had thousands of dollars in credit card debt more than once in my life.

If you have ever been in this situation or maybe you are in that position currently I want to share two simple tricks that will help you learn to manage money better and then learn to attract more of it in your future.

The first concept may seem silly and it’s certainly not my idea but it works if you allow yourself to try it. If you have a checking account then you probably have an unused check register lying around somewhere. If you don’t then get yourself a piece of lined paper and use a pen and layout the paper so that it looks like a check register.

On your first entry you will deposit $1,000 dollars into the pretend account. The next thing you need to do is spend all of it. I don’t want you to save a single penny on the first day. Think of something you have been wanting and write it into the register as if you actually purchased it. Once you have spent the entire amount put your register away until tomorrow. On your second day you will make a deposit for $2,000 dollars. Again, go ahead and spend it. Maybe you want to buy new clothes or some new music cd’s. Buy whatever you like, it’s your pretend money! Each day you will deposit one thousand dollars more than the previous day. Try to spend it if you can. Don’t be hard on yourself if you eventually run out of things to buy.

Maybe you could pay off those credit card bills. Or pay off your car loan. The important thing is to try and spend as much as you can. Once you are about two weeks into this exercise you will notice how increasingly hard it becomes to spend the money. By day 14 you will be depositing $14,000 dollars into the account. How are you going to spend it in one day? Now it’s almost as if there is too much money! The idea behind this exercise is each time you write a check for something you want to buy, Think about how good it feels to own the thing you so wanted. It feels good to get new things. We all love it. You will notice that once you pretend to buy something and focus on the feelings of having it, your feelings of wanting it in the first place will subside. Maybe the item will become less important to you. If you follow the exercise you will be amazed. When I first did this I spent my money on new TV’s, gadgets, and trip to exotic places. It wasn’t until about one week into it that I had the feeling that I didn’t want to spend the money anymore. Instead, I wanted to save it!

So here’s were this game gets real fun. After my first week I started imagining that if I saved the money each day I would soon be able to pay off all of my bills, buy a new house, buy my wife her dream car. I was filled with excitement about saving money! That was the first time in my life that had happened. I hope you give this simple game a try. It really works. If you have a dream of being successful, your first step is to learn how to manage your money. You will soon see just how abundant money really is.

The second game I want to tell you about is even simpler than the first. Get yourself a one hundred dollar bill and place it in your wallet. This exercise works best with real money, no fake IOU’s here. Place the money in your wallet and as you go about your day if you see something you want, think about the money in your wallet. You know you could buy the item but don’t do it. Imagine yourself spending the money on that precious little gadget that you must have. But only pretend! Spend that same one hundred dollars over and over in your mind. If you run out and actually spend the money then you only get to feel the satisfaction of spending it once. But if you imagine spending it, you can spend it thousands of times and get the same feeling over and over again.

These two simple games will put you in a mindset to begin to allow more money into your life. You are no different than anyone else. Money does not play favorites; it does not care who holds it or who spends it. We all want money, we all feel like we must have it in order to be successful. The truth is that the money will come as soon as you allow it to come to you. If by doing these simple exercises you learn to manage money even the tiniest bit better, you will soon see that money is abundant and it will come to you if you let it.