The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom (44 page)

Now ask yourself this question: Is there anyone in your life who you feel is cheap? How do you feel about this person? Do you think he or she can sense the way you feel?

And what about you? Do you think another person would describe you as cheap? Are you constantly worried that people are trying to take advantage of you and your money? Are you unwilling to let money go easily because you’re frightened of not having enough? If you have truthfully answered “No” to these questions, no doubt you already give freely, of yourself and your money, and already know freedom in your thoughts, your heart, your soul. If you’ve hesitated over any of these questions, or found yourself answering “Yes,” then by freeing up your money in this step, you will also free up your heart.

You open yourself to receive all that is meant to be yours. Giving not only when you feel poor, but also when you feel rich, lucky, grateful, expansive, vital. Giving to say please, and giving to say thank you. It’s the impulse to give that puts you in touch with the best part of yourself—and the principles of abundance that are alive in the world. Yes, we help ourselves when we give, but that is not why we give.

Decide on an amount of money that you feel you can give away freely every month. Let your inner voice determine the amount you should make as an offering. True giving comes as an impulse, so the amount need not be cast in stone, and it may vary from month to month. All that matters is that the amount be meaningful to you and that it be given with thought, humility, and gratitude. You must not give less than your inner voice tells you is the meaningful amount, for that is being cheap. That is not the way you want to thank the world and connect with it. Nor must you give more than you can afford, for that is not being responsible to yourself and your money. Your inner voice will dictate the amount each and every month, but each month it must be something.

If you are going to write a check to donate your money, write the check or make the online payment at the beginning of the month. Why the beginning of the month? So the act of giving isn’t an afterthought. By starting your giving at the beginning of every month, you are making yourself and your offering a real
priority, an act that will stay with you throughout the month. If you have so little money that you cannot afford to write a monthly check, make a point of gathering each day whatever spare coins or bills you can, and collect this money in your special place. Watch with respect as your offering accumulates. At the end of the month, and at the end of every month thereafter, please make your offering. Where? Using the following guidelines, choose with your heart—choosing where to give money is one of the great pleasures there is.

The action of giving money is different from giving anything else. Because of money’s living energy field, it is very hard to give it to another person as a gift in a pure, dharmic way—or to put it in more common terms, with no strings attached. If you give money to an individual, often rather than freeing you, that act can create a whole new set of emotional debts that can wreak havoc on your life the same way financial debt can. Any kind of debt is bondage. This doesn’t include giving a present of money for a birthday, wedding, or graduation, but applies only to gifts inspired by a pure impulse to give.

Studying the teachings of any religion will teach you that you are born with the duty of taking care of your parents, regardless of how well you feel they took care of you. When you give to your parents when they need it, you are truly opening up your hands and releasing your grasp on your money without creating debt. If your parents are in need and you can do this with tremendous humility, so as not to create a reverse bondage, you can give them your offering every month.

We do not have the same duty to give to our brothers, sisters, or other family members as we do to our parents. Even though you may love your siblings or other relatives with all your heart, these are different kinds of relationships. When giving to a family member other than a parent, or a person who served in a parental capacity, there is a real danger of this gift of money tainting the purity of your love—thus tainting the purity of your intention. You may be thinking that this doesn’t apply to you, given how much you love your brothers and sisters, but I ask you to take heed. I have seen the bitterness such “gifts” can eventually lead to many times in my practice, and I ask you to think very carefully before you give your monthly offering to a family member other than a parent.

For instance, if you happen to have a brother or sister making far more money than you are, do you secretly wish they’d do a little something to help make your own life easier? This is a common thought. But if such a “gift” came, do you really believe that no expectations would be attached? Won’t that brother wonder about or care what you did with the money? What if you ran into your sister while you were having dinner at a nice restaurant? Would you freeze with guilt, in case she thought you were spending her gift frivolously? Might your sibling start asking you what you need money for? What if you start doing much better financially? Will you feel the need to give back the money? Will your brother or sister feel you should? If you find yourself answering “Yes” to any of these questions, the gift in question is neither purely given nor purely received. Maybe yours is one of the rare families where you truly do see each other as one. But most of us can’t open our hands gracefully to give to or receive from family members in a pure way, so I do not recommend making your monthly offerings to family members.

With friends, as with family members (other than children and parents), caregiving is not an inborn dharmic duty, which makes it extremely difficult to give money to friends in an appropriate way. I’m not saying that it can’t be done, just that it is extremely difficult.

If you offer something as treasured to you as your money to a needy friend to, say, pay her bills, you have not really done anything to make yourself, or her, more powerful. In fact, you may have created a problem for yourself—because from now on, whenever you see that person, whether you want to or not, you will remember the “gift,” and so will your friend. You will remember it in particular if you fall on some harder times somewhere down the road, especially if your friend is doing much better.

Money can forever alter the love in a friendship, so I do not recommend giving your monthly gift to friends.

To my mind, the purest gift, the one that truly loosens our cramped clutch on money, is a gift to a charity. With this kind of gift, no debt is created, no bondage. You are faceless to the charity, a name on a donors’ data bank. Maybe you’re just slipping cash into a donation box, and no one will ever know that you have given it. If you give this way, your gift is pure.

I have found that the most liberating offering of all is one you make to a charity you care deeply about.

To see just how powerful money is when it changes hands, try this experiment if you can. Walk up to the first person you see
on the street (an ordinary stranger, not a panhandler) and try to hand that person a dollar bill. Note how you feel. How did he look at you? Did he take it? Did he say anything? How much anticipation (or dread) did you feel before giving him the dollar? Were you able to do it at all?

Now take another dollar bill and enter a place of worship. Locate the donation box and place the dollar in it. How did you feel this time? Did you say a prayer as you let that dollar drop? Did you feel better after making your offering? And there was no complicated reaction from the donation box, was there?

Compare how differently you felt after giving each “gift.” Most of us feel awkward handing money to a person (and most of us would also feel awkward being the recipient, which should tell you something as well). Remember, the act of giving is meant to open you up, literally to alter how you feel; its power is rooted in your altered state. Most of us, too, feel a serenity when placing the donation in the box, for such a gift to charity is a pure one without the emotional baggage of giving to an individual person.

Regardless of how much money you have, it is the natural tendency of the mind to think: I can’t give money this month, I don’t even have enough to pay the bills. Or: There are so many things that I need, I lack, I want.

This is the exact moment to give
, to give an amount that is meaningful but realistic. You must break these thoughts of poverty, for thoughts of poverty are bonds of poverty, for thoughts of poverty are the chains that keep you bound to poverty. Mental chains may be invisible but they imprison you nevertheless. You must and you can break through, overcome, move beyond these mental barriers. You must open your hand. Repeat the new truth you created in Step 3 for strength, think
of how much you do have, think of others with far less, and give thanks with your gift.

True financial freedom is a powerful state of mind, a state of being, and it comes from following all nine steps toward financial freedom. When you have reached this seventh step, and feel free to give from what you have and what you are creating, purely and from the heart, you are nearly free. With your offerings you are participating in the flow of wealth, which, I’ve discovered, is never-ending. It isn’t how much you have that creates a sense of freedom. It’s how you feel about what you have, or don’t have, that either keeps you prisoner or sets you free—which is the eighth step to financial freedom.

W
HEN THE THINGS
that occupy us so intensely in the present have receded into the past, we look back at these events, which produce such turmoil and pain, with an entirely different eye. How often have you heard, for example, of someone who is devastated by being fired, only to land a much better job and end up happier? Or of someone whose spouse leaves her, and who decides—one, two, five years later—that it was the best thing that could have happened to her? Or of someone who emerges from a serious illness with a wisdom and appreciation of life that he had never had before? The passage of time always
offers a new perspective. “If only I knew then what I know now.” Haven’t you ever uttered these words? Time can reveal many lessons, but often it takes us too long to listen. The eighth step to financial freedom is about understanding and accepting the natural cycles of money—as it ebbs and flows through our lives, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in discord, much like the cycles of our bodies, our planet—and the constant up-and-down movement of the economy you read about in the newspapers.

It is so important to learn to accept that your own money will also have its ups and downs. No matter how carefully you plan—even if you do every financial thing right—money, like every other living thing, isn’t always going to behave in ways you can predict. Sometimes you’ll have more than you expected, and at other times, money will flow out and you’ll have less than you thought. There may be a time when you have money in the stock market and it goes down dramatically. Or maybe you suddenly inherit a valuable piece of property. Perhaps you are downsized from your job without warning—or given a surprise promotion. I’ve seen this kind of thing happen with my clients again and again. You think your financial life is rolling along a certain track and boom, you’re going in a different direction.

These transitions can be exciting, or often scary, but they are all part of the natural cycles of life—and money. In Step 8, there are two lessons to remember about these natural ups and downs.

First, you must always take the long view of your financial future. If you have taken the steps outlined in this book, the setbacks you may have today or next year will not keep you from financial freedom. In order for you to create what is in your power to create, you must believe that you can and you will.

Second—and for some people this may be more difficult to
do than anything else I have told you so far—you must believe that everything that happens is positive, if you are willing to let it be.

I know some of you are going to say, “Suze, how can it be a positive thing if my husband leaves me and cleans out my bank account?” “How can it be a positive thing if I lose all my savings in a stock market crash?” Please understand, I am not saying such events won’t be tragic and painful; I have been through some of them myself, and I know how hard they can be. But I also have learned that they can, if we are open to them, teach us lessons and give us gifts that we would never have found at more comfortable times. Things that seem almost unbearable as they’re happening to you can even, in the long run, lead to riches you never imagined.