You can have more money. And you can have it \u2014 get it \u2014 without turning your life upside down or driving yourself nuts. Seriously.<\/p>\n
I got it that way, quietly, simply, and still am. You can, too. Maybe only a modest amount more, maybe a lot more. I don’t know. But I do<\/em> know that you can have more. I’m not doing anything so far as concept and technique go that you can’t either. I just work the simple little four-point program that follows. You’re welcome to it.<\/p>\n Here’s what I do \u2014 and don’t do.<\/p>\n Never incur new unsecured debt<\/em><\/strong> I know: using debt<\/em> as a verb is unlovely. But it helps to distinguish that act from other uses of money, to be clear about what is actually being done \u2014 not spending, buying, enjoying, but: going into debt.<\/p>\n Readers of Get Rich Slowly<\/a> and other personal finance blogs almost certainly know that using unsecured credit is a bad idea. But I’ll tell you: It’s more than a bad idea. It’s a catastrophe<\/em>. If any single thing can crush, break, and poison a life, kill anything of value or pleasure in it, it’s unsecured debt, the sustained and mounting pressure of it over months, years, and even decades.<\/p>\n In his play A Doll’s House<\/em><\/a>, Henrik Ibsen wrote more than 130 years ago, “There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing or debt.”<\/strong><\/p>\n True. I’ve never seen anyone for whom it isn’t.<\/p>\n By the time I bottomed out on debt myself, way back in 1984, my marriage was over, my books were out of print, and my life shattered. I was waking up every morning with ground-glass in my stomach thinking, \u201cOh God, there’s another bill coming in!\u201d without any idea how I would ever be able to pay it. I was living in near constant pain and despair.<\/p>\n I was $113,000 in unsecured debt then (in today’s dollars), had expenses of $3,000 a month and a guaranteed income of only $350 a month. It was clear, finally \u2014 made brutally clear to me by the misery, the anguish even \u2014 that this could not go on. So I stopped debting, cold turkey. Because I had to. Because I knew there was no other hope for me.<\/p>\n From that day in March of 1984 on, I did everything and anything I had to in order not to go one single dollar deeper into unsecured debt:<\/p>\n Slowly, slowly, things began to get better.<\/p>\n It was out of that bottom and my recovery from it, out of not-debting, eventually paying off all that unsecured debt, and becoming free that I wrote my first book on personal money, How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously<\/a><\/em>. It was the first book ever on that subject, to my best knowledge, and it’s been in continuous print since 1988 (updated and expanded in 2003).<\/p>\n Now your circumstances may not be anywhere near as dire as mine were (at least I hope they aren’t), but the fact remains: You cannot get out of debt by going deeper into it.<\/strong> Nor will you be able to bring more money into your life \u2014 at least permanently, steadily \u2014 until you stop incurring any new unsecured debt. At best, that kind of debt will just continue to siphon money out of your life, relentlessly, and will be a nearly impenetrable barrier toward bringing more of it in. More that’s yours to keep<\/p>\n So unless you can claim that you genuinely live free of any<\/em> amount \u2014 any amount \u2014 for, say, at least 40 weeks out of every year (an only partly arbitrary number) . . . stop debting. Right now.<\/p>\n Understand that all economies are personal<\/em><\/strong> Some people have a hard time wrapping their minds around this. I certainly did.<\/p>\n During most of the booming 1980s, when money was washing back and forth through the economy in great tidal waves and Americans were prospering as they rarely had before, I was making very little money. This wasn’t because of any technological, social, or other kind of upheaval that had disoriented me. I could argue for that (in my own case the rise of video and cable TV, computers, changes in the publishing industry, a shrinking literacy rate, a blow to my personal life), but it would be a specious argument, mostly a function of denial.<\/p>\n Weren’t there some<\/em> real reasons? Of course, but they came and went and I was still engaged in what I have since come to call underearning<\/a>. And at the same time, there were other people whose backgrounds and experiences were similar to mine \u2014 who got divorced, for example, or were writers \u2014 who weren’t<\/em> underearning.<\/p>\n These days, the Banking and Real Estate Collapse of 2008\/2009 remains the great ogre: the bogeyman, scapegoat, and whipping boy of the moment, blamed by many for the fact that they’re in debt or can’t get ahead much. (Before the Collapse of 2008\/2009 it was the Dot.com Crash of 2000\/2002; before that, the Recession of the 1990s; before that . . . .) In some cases, it’s true; those events and their aftermaths did preclude some people, some few, from any chance of bringing in more money. But consider: In the very midst of those booming 1980s, more than 20 million Americans<\/em>, from all classes, backgrounds, and walks of life found themselves overwhelmed<\/em> by personal debt. And this: Personal bankruptcy climbed by 300 percent during those prosperous years to nearly 1 million people a year by the end of the decade.<\/p>\n On the other hand, at the height of Recession of the 1990s, and during the first full twelve-month period in which I practiced this simple system, along with a few supporting concepts and techniques, I brought in more money than I ever had in any other year of my life, significantly more. And that same thing is true \u2014 at the very least, some<\/em> kind of increase \u2014 of everyone I have ever worked with or known who has employed this system. What I and they have had in common, in addition to the other three parts of this system, is that we recognize (or, some might argue, choose to see) that all economies are personal, even when the macro economy is struggling or in a serious downturn.<\/p>\n There is no denying that the larger economy does have an impact, but the most it can generally dictate, barring complete collapse, is the manner<\/em> in which you earn your living and otherwise bring in money, not whether<\/em> you can. Your<\/em> economy is personal.<\/p>\n Diversify<\/em><\/strong> Diversifying in your<\/em> life \u2014 your earning life, your money-getting life \u2014 can give you the same advantage: minimize the damage you might otherwise sustain in a setback such as being laid off or losing a client, generate new opportunities for you and maximize your ability to take advantage of them.<\/p>\n If one definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results, another is to keep doing over and over again something that used to work, after the context has changed, and expect it still to work.<\/p>\n That’s what I had been doing. My first step in stopping this was to admit to myself that what I had been doing \u2014 writing novels, and in a particular way (selling them before I wrote them, in proposal form) \u2014 was no longer working, wasn’t bringing in enough to meet my needs. Once it had, but now it wasn’t. What follows is a distilled version of how I initially diversified, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.<\/p>\n How I Diversified<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n First, I asked: \u201cWhere does the problem lie \u2014 me, my agent, or the changes that have taken place in publishing?\u201d<\/p>\n The answer, I decided, was in all three.<\/p>\n The solution: change agents, alter my own activities. (There was nothing I could do about publishing, which is a monolith.)<\/p>\n I changed agents.<\/p>\n It was in changing my activities that I diversified.<\/p>\n I began to write for magazines again. (Which I hadn’t done in nearly a dozen years.) The money wasn’t such that it offered a long-term solution, but the cash was helpful in the short run.<\/p>\n In books, I turned to nonfiction, drawing upon my work, research, and experience in psychology, personal transformation, and debt recovery over the past several years.<\/p>\n I searched myself for other marketable skills I might have. (My resume said: \u201cMr. Mundis has been a novelist for 20 years.\u201d I looked in the paper; there wasn’t much corporate call for novelists.)<\/p>\n Editing, I decided. That was a skill I possessed. So I became willing to go into an office for a while. (Here I discovered that I had an ego-investment in never having worked for anyone else, and had to overcome that). But though I was now willing, who would hire me? I had never worked<\/em> as an editor in my life. In fact, except for a few months right out of college, I had never worked for anyone<\/em> in any<\/em> capacity. But I went ahead anyway, made phone calls, sent letters \u2014 and ended up as a feature editor at The New York Times<\/em>, where I stayed for a year and a half.<\/p>\n I also knew more about overcoming writer’s block than anyone I’d ever met or whose work I’d ever read. Because of my own difficulties with block, I’d had to develop and employ a variety of means over the years to render it harmless. So I put together a consultation session that would break writer’s block for anyone, forever, in a single afternoon, and establish for them a productive and reliable working schedule. The first year, that consulting brought in 15 percent of my gross income.<\/p>\n Next, I adapted the block-breaking material into a day-long seminar designed to reinvigorate corporate staff writers who were burned out, and took that seminar into corporations and professional associations.<\/p>\n Then, staying with nonfiction, I wrote a book<\/a> which presented step-by-step the program I used in breaking writer’s block.<\/p>\n Shortly after, one of my block-breaking clients, a writer and television producer, became involved with a project for cable television and asked me to join him as a writer. I did, for six months.<\/p>\n I also developed a series of workshops on debt-recovery and other aspects of handling money in a positive way, which I presented for corporations, private institutions, and community groups in various parts of the country. . . . .<\/p>\n Now, at this writing, I’m busy scanning some dozen and a half of my out-of-print novels and nonfiction books, converting them into Word documents and formatting them for self-publication as eBooks for Kindle and Nook, and on Smashwords for iPad and other readers.<\/p>\n After that, well, I don’t yet. There’ll be something.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Diversification, then, is a process in which you identify the skills and abilities you possess in addition to those you use in your main occupation \u2014 or further ways to apply those you already do<\/em> use there \u2014 and then find avenues through which to turn them into income-producing activities.<\/p>\n Craig, for example, a high-school teacher in Minnesota, an avid fisherman and outdoorsman, diversified by guiding parties of vacationers on fishing trips, later by creating a small business out of repairing and reconditioning antique fishing tackle and boats, and still later by making custom bamboo fly rods to order. My friend Judy Collins<\/a>, the Grammy winning singer, songwriter, and author, created her own recording company, Wildflower Records, and has signed several artists to it in addition to maintaining her own demanding concert schedule.<\/p>\n If you’re already working fulltime, you can undertake diversification as something you do an evening or two a week or on a Saturday morning or afternoon, whatever fits your life. I’m not suggesting that you simply work more hours each week: the key is to be sure that your diversifying activities are high-paying \u2014 in the sense that they bring you, ideally, at<\/em> least twenty-five percent more per hour than you make at your job or normal work.<\/p>\n
\nI don’t debt and haven’t for 28 years now.<\/p>\n\n
\nEveryone \u2014 you, I, and everyone else \u2014 has his or her own personal economy<\/a>, which is separate and apart from the national economy. In fact, so far as bringing more money into your life goes, the larger economy is mostly irrelevant<\/strong>.<\/p>\n
\nTo diversify means to spread over several areas, to introduce variety. It’s a time-honored financial principle. Corporations do it by entering multiple arenas of activity or making different kinds of products. Investors do it by buying several stocks instead of just one. The primary advantage of diversifying is that it minimizes the risk of loss.<\/strong> Basically it’s a practical application of the old saw, \u201cDon’t put all your eggs in one basket.\u201d<\/p>\n