{ Women and Money }

Yesterday I was in a Board Retreat for Women Take Wing http://www.womentakewing.com and during one of our many (many many) conversations around women in business we talked some about women and their responses to money. It's so interesting to me that during these conversations it always comes back to an emotional tie..how we feel about money, how it makes us feel, etc. As we took a lunch break, I began to wonder if men ever talk like this or if they even PROCESS like this about money. But the long and short of it is, as a society we have given money a value and that value is both tangible (a dollar is worth 100 pennies, which ties to how much gold or maybe the GNP ...blah blah blah or something like that, seriously I keep telling you this isn't what I paid attention to in school) and intangible. Do you think Paris Hilton would be at all interesting if she made $45,000 a year. Who would care what she thought was so hot?

No, somehow as a society we have decided that if you have money, you have a special value and with each passing generation that number goes up. For example, as a kid, the "one day if we win the lottery" dream was to own a million dollar house. Guess what? My childhood home in California would sell today for just under that number. Trust me, it's a nice suburban track home but if I won the lottery tomorrow, I wouldn't be looking at that house. (Actually, I'd buy five acres just outside city limits a mile away from where I live now and get me a chicken coop and grow way more food...but I digress.) But several years back I remember hearing a story out of the South of a woman who died in her 90's who left something like $500,000 to a small college for a scholarship fund and that was after putting several local kids through school already. This woman made well below the median income at the time...something like $28,000 a year. How did she do that? Simple. If she made $28,000 a year she likely only spent $16,000 or $20,000.
Live within the boundaries of what you make, commit to saving some of it for later and you too can be rich. That is what I'm striving for today. To pay off the debt we just accumulated (by choice) as quickly as possible and then to live on 65% of what we currently make. Would I love a vacation on a beach next year? Yes. Is it worth working after the age of 70 if I don't WANT to work after the age of 70? Heck,no. The more I am committed to "need it" vs. "want it" today, the more choices I will have tomorrow.