to honestly assess where you’re starting from. Are you financially out of shape right now? If so, what can you do about it? To fix a problem, you first have to face the facts and deal with them. Then comes the hard part: finding the willpower to change your current habits in order to reach your new-found goals.
There are some strong similarities between being physically unfit and being financially unfit. For one, neither state is immediately obvious at a glance.
For example, you don’t have to be seriously overweight to be physically unfit. It is medically possible to be thin as a rail and still have arteries that are clogged with cholesterol. You can even have a physique that’s the envy of the gym, and still not be able to engage in vigorous cardiovascular activity for more than a few minutes. The person who looks slightly overweight may actually be in better aerobic shape than his leaner companion, with healthier blood pressure, cleaner arteries and a less-stressed heart.
The same is true about a lack of financial fitness. You may have a fancy house, a stylish car, lots of snazzy electronic toys and an expensive lifestyle—but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re really wealthy. You don’t have to live in a trailer park to be financially unfit. The harsh truth is, that guy living in a trailer may in fact be more financially fit than you if he lives within his means, has a few dollars of savings and is debt-free.
If you can’t climb a single flight of stairs or walk a few blocks without panting for breath, then it’s fair to assume that your physical fitness may need some work. The same is true with your money. If you have to scramble to pay your bills every month; if you’re living from paycheck to paycheck; if you’re taking cash advances from your credit card and running outstanding balances; or if you have to keep dipping into your line of credit just to meet your current expenses—then odds are, financially, you’re probably seriously out of shape.
Over the years that we’ve worked in the financial business—and between us, we have more than half a century of front-line experience with helping people manage their money—we’ve seen a lot of people go astray for want of a few simple tips and principles.
Alan has been a broker, banker and financial advisor for more than twenty years. Paul is a tax lawyer who has handled personal and corporate finance issues for more than thirty years. In all that time, we’ve had many a chance to observe human behaviour when it comes to money—to see the common mistakes so many people make, and to learn what can be done to correct them. Seeing the unnecessary carnage and misery that resulted from these mistakes led us to create a program that, if properly followed, will give you the ability and the tools to work your way reasonably painlessly up to a level of financial fitness that properly reflects your circumstances, needs, ambitions and means.
Like any other fitness plan, our system works by giving you the help and support you need to boost your own discipline. A good place to start is by being honest with yourself. If you’re like most people, you probably aren’t perfect. Believe it or not, neither are we. If you’re in trouble with your finances, it’s likely because you were a bit lazy or too casual about your affairs. You either knew the rules and didn’t make the effort to follow them, or else you just turned a blind eye to the whole subject and hoped it would somehow work out for the best.
What you need now—what everybody needs when they first make a constructive effort to turn their lives around—is help to deal with the problem. Think of our program as the financial equivalent of Jenny CraigTM, Weight WatchersTM or the YMCA. All those services are based on the simple reality that most people need the help of a coach to permanently change their existing habits.
We’ve named our program the Copperjar System™ after the jar that Al’s grandmother used to put aside the family savings. In some ways, it resembles the workbooks we all used to have back in school. Think of these as exercises to get you back on the path to better financial health.
Some people may want to do these exercises and work their way out of their situations on their own, with no assistance. They just want a road map to point them in the right direction. Others may prefer to have ongoing help to check their financial “vital signs” as they go, sort of like a monitor for their progress. Either way, our step-by-step program is designed to be user-friendly—meaning you don’t need a degree in economics or in-depth knowledge of the investment markets to understand the advice and benefit from it.
Most of us are familiar with the problems of losing weight, and with the best solutions to that problem. We have applied the same attitude to the challenges of trying to become financially fit. That’s why, throughout this book, we keep comparing the process to a physical fitness program. (After all, that’s a challenge that virtually all of us have had to address at some stage in our lives!)
So if you’re serious about pursuing your goal, this book will help you get there. It’s not fancy, it’s not complicated, and it doesn’t just hand out a bunch of glib tips of limited practical value. It doesn’t provide a series of isolated exercises that only fix part of the problem. Nor does it start off holding your hand, only to abandon you when the going gets tough. Instead, this book offers a complete program to get you financially fit, which is based almost entirely on accumulated professional experience and a lot of plain old-fashioned common sense.
At each step of our program, we explain clearly why that stage is important, and we give you guidance to help you to navigate your way through it. The end of every chapter includes a summary of the key principles that have been covered, which are themselves gathered together at the end of the book into a handy “checklist for financial health.” (But if you’re tempted to just skip the next 140 pages and jump straight to the last chapter, be warned: that magic checklist won’t make a whole lot of sense if you haven’t read enough to understand its elements and how they all fit together.)
So be patient. It isn’t a long book—we promise! As you read through each chapter, you’ll find some tough questions for you to answer, and some tough issues for you to deal with. This book is meant to be read in stages and reread as necessary. Like life, financial fitness is a process. You can start, fail and start again, and still succeed in the long term.
To give you a rough sense of what you can expect, here’s a brief summary of what follows:
•Chapter One helps you set your initial targets, goals and values, to establish the framework that will guide your decisions as you go forward. It asks you to honestly assess your current financial situation and attitudes, as well as how they affect your big picture. There’s no single right or wrong answer to the question of how you spend or save your money. That depends on what’s important to you. Your values aren’t the same as someone else’s, and their goals aren’t necessarily your goals. The aim of this chapter is to help you focus on those elements, and identify what’s vital to you and what isn’t.
•Chapter Two asks you to undergo a “check-up,” just as you would when starting a physical fitness program, to assess exactly how fit (or un-fit) you are right now. This baseline information will help you determine what your next goals should be, what kind of rigours you can withstand, and how much you should try to do in the early stages of your new fitness program. This chapter will give you a firm foundation on which to base your financial outlook.
•Chapter Three builds on that baseline and sets out the platform that will sustain your program going forward. The aim of this chapter is to get you to understand where your money is going, how you are spending it, and why you are spending it that way.
•Chapter Four allows you to set your own personal financial fitness goals for your life—long-term goals that include saving for your retirement, so you can sustain the lifestyle you want or imagine you’ll want in the future. The object of this chapter is to help you take control of your financial future and get the advice you need to make the right decisions for you and your family.
•Chapter Five sets out the routine that will allow you to develop the level of financial fitness you need. This includes illustrating how you can start with a modest program, and build the confidence to succeed in your plan.
•Chapter Six addresses