Financial Health

Financial Health

Financial health is about being self-sufficient and independent. Everyone has the opportunity to achieve financial health in their lives. This is not determined by your birth, your inheritance, your job, the stock market luck or winning the lottery. Many people have had these opportunities and still remain financially unhealthy. The key to financial health is to first cultivate the correct attitude to financial matters and then craft a plan specific to your unique goals and objectives. You then need the discipline to follow that plan.

That is, the basics for improving your financial health include:

Healthy financial attitudes
Healthy financial planning
Supportive disciplines

Healthy Financial Attitudes: Many people on the spiritual path struggle to blend their spiritual life with their financial health. Some do not want to put too much effort on the material rewards in life, some simply ignore or look down on this aspect, and some are just scared. Indeed, many spiritual teachers in the past have professed that poverty is a key to the path of enlightenment. These teachers believed that people without material desires have more freedom to explore their spiritual depth. Unfortunately this approach only represents one side of the duality inherent in materialism. No matter whether it is the promotion of poverty or riches, both are emotional reactions to the possession of goods and money.

What is the correct attitude? We must accept that managing our finances is a part of worldly life. We also need to realize that creating financial health is important on our spiritual path. That path includes the responsibility of taking care of both ourselves and others. We either do it well or do it badly, but cannot avoid it. How we choose our career, how we blend our passion and talent, and how we express our creativity are all part of our spiritual health. Once we understand this position, we can view our finances dispassionately, rather than seeing them as a stigma or a merit.

When we view our career as part of our spiritual path, rather than a distraction or nuisance, we can spend more time improving our finances and eventually see how this can release the freedom and creativity of life. Money is just another form of energy, or chi, which allows us to make healthy choices and decisions in life.

Healthy Financial Planning: The PCL Financial Health course being developed will give detailed guidance on how to create a financial plan to ensure personal control of your financial health. It incorporates three areas - income, budgeting and investments. For more information visit the Financial Health Course from the College of Tao.

Income: In school we are generally taught that rewards only go to those who are smart and work hard. Later we may have trouble realizing that success and earning ability in the workplace often comes from being likeable, or creative, or by adding value. The market place puts a premium on these skills and the top echelon in any profession got there because of their ability to master all or some of these skills.

We should all improve our communication and listening skills to be more likeable and effective. Of course we should also be smart, creative and work hard. Every profession has examples of people who have risen to the top and define excellence as well as financial reward. We do not have to sacrifice our dreams but should remember that not everybody has all the skills for success. So be humble and accept that the skills for financial success may be different to those we have developed thus far.

Budgeting: No level of income is ever too high to ignore this counsel. Without a good budget, and the discipline to maintain it, any gains can be undone through over spending and the inability to save. This is the area we have the most ability to control. Yet ironically, it is easier to blame our choice of job, an unlucky investment, high gas prices, or the economy rather than our spending choices for our inability to save. If we prioritize financial health we can make an extra effort to save on a consistent and steady basis.

Investments: A strategic game some call ‘Winning for Losers’ is suggested. Followers of the Way might call it’s the philosophy of wu wei which means “do nothing extra” in Chinese. This does not suggest inaction but, making a long term plan based on your own objectives and sticking to it. Adjustments can be made as conditions change but having such a plan means never needing to make a decision based on market extremes.

Supportive Disciplines: We can also help to cultivate our financial health in our daily meditation and chi practices. Consider the wood element as our financial growth and the fire element as its expansion. These must be blended with the earth element to help conserve our financial resource, or with the metal element to help our resourcefulness with financial matters. Finally, we must blend in the water element to regenerate our financial resources. When we talk about different strategies within our long-term financial objectives during the Financial Health course, we use feng shui as well as the more traditional technical and fundamental analyses. The blend of these approaches can add significant value as long as the long term objective is not compromised.