A woman who attended one of our workshops in NYC recently sent me an article on how a family shed $106,000 in debt. If you or someone you know is feeling overwhelmed by money issues, I encourage you to read this article and forward it further. It’s quite inspiring.
Also, if you have any interest in examining the true value of a college education, I encourage you to check out this article which was posted recently on Get Rich Slowly. Since the costs of college have risen so much faster than inflation, it’s always useful to do the math and make sure you’re getting the maximum value possible out of this very expensive investment. One of the points guest blogger Jason Barr makes in the piece is that those who earn approximately $50,000/year (assuming a constant 4% rate of inflation and salary adjustments to keep up with that pace until retirement at age 65) can expect a lifetime earning potential of nearly six million dollars. That number blew me away. It made me think that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to mentally add another exercise to Step 1 in Your Money or Your Life: after getting your Social Security Statement which shows how much money you’ve made so far in your life, consider projecting out how much you’re making now and what level of income you believe you’ll be making in the future. If more Americans making $50,000/year could imagine that they’d earn $6 million by the time they retire, it might make them much more interested in saving as much of that bounty as possible (instead of always thinking of their salary as Never Enough.)