We’re Moving on Up!

Ahh…the Jeffersons. Gotta love the upwardly mobile Manhattan couple who brought us so much joy and laughter growing up. While many folks know Weezy and George for their “deluxe apartment in the sky”, very few people ever talk about their life before moving to the east side.

Before moving on up, the Jefferson’s lived on down – in a working class neighborhood in Queens to be exact. In fact, they were originally introduced to us on television as the new neighbors of Archie and Edith Bunker of All in the Family. Another fact about the Jeffersons that we often forget is that it took many years for George to build up his chain of seven cleaners throughout NYC in order to be able to comfortably afford moving to the east side.

The lesson here is that sometimes it is necessary to move on down before moving on UP!

I was reminded of this lesson recently when my better half and I were discussing moving out of our current flat into a more affordable part of town. The flat we have now is gorgeous with an outdoor terrace, crown molding, hardwood floors, ample closet space and central access to work, school and all forms of public transport. The problem? It’s extremely overpriced. When we first moved here we really had no clue. We just knew that we needed to be in a central part of town and everything the brokers showed us was overpriced. However, after a few months of getting to know pocket neighborhoods and talking to locals, we realized we could get a better deal. Once we figured out that we could save several hundred dollars a month by just switching zip codes, we started getting really critical about all the things we really needed to make our house a home. Was it essential that we had outdoor space? Did we need to be less than a block away from the tube? After a month of searching high and low for a new place that was fabulous yet still affordable, I am happy to report that we found a place that we absolutely adore! And guess what…we still have all the things we enjoyed about our old place, just in a smaller floor plan.

So we have decided to move on down for the time being….because we know that living below our means today will allow us to reach our goal of being financial independent that much sooner.

Have you ever considered cutting some of your fixed costs to achieve your financial goals? What would you do with an extra few hundred bucks a month?

A Christmas Lesson from the Jackson 5

Whether you celebrate Kwanzaa, Chanukah, Christmas or something else entirely, you are aware of the pressure to spend money on the ones you love during the holiday. From a very young age we are taught that how many toys sitting for us under the tree is directly correlated to just how much our friends and family love us. This year, we decided to buck the trend and vowed not to buy Christmas presents in my family. Everyone was on board…that is until it was discovered that one person decided to go ahead and just buy a little something for everyone. What’s Christmas without presents right? Next thing you know, everyone is out on Christmas Eve buying just a little something. You don’t want to be the relative who comes to the party empty handed do you? Does it matter that Aunt Gwen already has plenty of cookbooks? No, she can always use another. Do you know if Grandma Jones already has a Snuggie? No, if she does she can always just return it. As I was scrambling from mall to mall last night trying to find the perfect little gift, I stopped myself. All I really wanted to give my family on Christmas Day was love – pure and sweet. None of the stuff I was buying could communicate that better than my own heartfelt words and actions.

That is when I decided that this Christmas I was going to take a lesson from the Jackson 5 and do just that – give LOVE!

Happy Holidays!

Getting LinkedIn

“Who me?” Yes, you Kim. What exactly do you do for a living? Photo Credit: http://bit.ly/6RuCki

Although some of us wish we could find a way to just get paid for being our fabulous selves (a la Kim Kardashian), most of us have to work for our money. If you are part of the working crew you know the power of having a solid network. Knowing the right people could mean the difference between being the star at your firm for getting the deal done or just struggling along trying not to get fired.

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social network. If you don’t have an account, you should run to your nearest computer and sign up today! LinkedIn is the future of career networking and job searching. It’s like Facebook for all the corporate suits you like in the office but aren’t really ready to “friend” yet. If you are serious about your career you should have an account and use it as an extension of your online brand.

LinkedIn just added a new feature out called faceted search which makes it even more powerful. You can search using filters from 8 facets: current company, past company, location, relationship, location, industry, school, and profile languages.

So this means for example, if you are a corporate lawyer now, but have dreams of moving to Paris and working for L’Oreal you could search for people who worked for your current law firm, who live in Paris, who are friends of friends, who went to your law school and speak English! And voila!! You are just one email away from connecting with someone who can change your career trajectory!

Below are some screenshots that show you just how this thing works. Happy Networking!

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Top 3 Things You Can Learn from the Tiger Woods Scandal

Photo Credit: http://bit.ly/6WdF6w

If you have been anywhere near a computer, radio, tv or magazine these past couple of days there is no way you could escape the latest updates on the Tiger Woods scandal. First the story was his wife hit him upside the head with a 9-iron because she caught him cheating, causing him to crash his car. Then, what was thought to be one mistress turned into two then three then NINE (including a porn star)! Oh my!

Now the secret is out…Tiger really is a Tiger on and off the course. But are you surprised? Ok maybe a little. I mean Tiger is (or was) pretty squeaky clean.

So what can we learn from this situation? I’m glad you asked. Here goes…

The Top 3 Things You Can Learn from Tigerate:

3. Don’t let your emotions get the best of you when the heat is on…always keep on your thinking cap

The most surprising thing I found about the whole Tiger scandal wasn’t that he cheated or that he had multiple mistresses. It was the fact that all these women were speaking out freely about their sexual relations with Tiger with little to nothing in exchange for their stories than two seconds of fame on TMZ as Tiger’s play thing.  Why on earth someone would want to be on the cover of a gossip magazine loudly proclaiming that they were someone’s mistress I do not understand.  One mistress, Jaimee Grubbs, said she came forward because she found out there were other mistresses and felt betrayed.  Say, WHAT?!?  The one chic that did allegedly have her thinking cap on scored big though. Rachel Uchitel was set to go public and admit her affair with Tiger Woods until a last-minute flurry of phone calls between her rep and representatives for the golfer.  She supposedly got $1M bucks to keep her mouth shut. Not bad for a days work. Reportedly, Tiger’s wife, Elin, also didn’t do to bad for herself and negotiated an upgrade in her prenup terms from $20M to $80M if she stays married to the golfer for ten years after his “transgressions.”

2. Privacy, Smivacy:

As signaled by Facebook CEO’s open letter to all FB users last week, privacy is a big concern for all us NetGeners who use social media on a daily basis. Especially when Facebook status updates have resulted in job loss or even, remarkably, the loss of health-care benefits most recently. Tiger was extremely naive to think that his mistresses would keep his voicemails and text messages private. Don’t you make the same mistake. It is best to operate as if every text message, every Facebook update and every phone message you leave will come back one day to bite you in the rear so think twice before you shoot off that message to your co-worker complaining about your egomaniacal boss. He just might have that phone line tapped.

1. *ish Happens, So Be Prepared:

The most important lesson learned from this whole mess is a point that Tiger’s wife is fully aware of at the moment, and that is that *ish happens! Now, I don’t want to be Debbie Downer here but hear me out. Do you think Elin ever thought this was coming? Likely not. Tiger was perceived by most as being the “good guy” of sports and given that she just gave birth to their second baby this past February this likely came as a total surprise. The lesson here is that you have to be prepared for the unexpected. While I am sure Elin won’t be living on the streets anytime soon, there are tons of other women (and men) in similar situations who aren’t married to mega-millionaires who haven’t planned for the financial implications of infidelity and/or divorce. No one wants this to happen but the reality is that 50% of marriages end in divorce and roughly 24% of men (about 50M) cheat on their wives. Of that 50% have multiple mistresses. (Check out more stats here if you are interested)  Bottom Line: Make sure that you have taken the necessary precautions to protect yourself if and when *ish hits the fan! In this case, it appears that Elin had a pretty good lawyer negotiate her prenup so it should be smooth sailing for her either way.

In all seriousness though, I do hope they are able to work this out, repair their marriage and move on with their lives for the sake of their children.

Until next time, Happy Chanukah!

Chris Rock & 7 Traits of the Wealthy

While working on my book this weekend I started thinking a lot about the difference between being wealthy and being rich.  What’s the difference you ask? I have my own thoughts but Chris Rocks’ is much more entertaining so let’s hear his first..

Now that you know the difference between the two, I have a question…which do you want to be, rich or wealthy?

I think if I polled a lot of my friends they would say that they want to be wealthy but in reality I don’t think that is true.  I think most people want all the access, luxuries and high-priced cars and houses that come with making a lot of money but don’t necessarily want to a) work for it or b) be disciplined enough about their spending to preserve it.

Becoming wealthy is harder than becoming rich because it requires discipline, hard work and sacrifice.  And let’s be completely honest, many of us don’t like any of those things. Hard work and discipline maybe, but sacrifice!  Thats a whole other things all together.  Being wealthy requires the BIG sacrifice of living below your means.  It means keeping that 1995 Honda Accord you had in college if it still runs even if you can afford a new BMW.  Sometimes it means living Uptown in Harlem in a studio apartment in New York even if you can afford to live 5 minutes from work in Midtown because it saves you $500/month that you can then reinvest elsewhere.

The notion of sacrifice and trade offs I think is the rub for most folks in our generation.  Us being the “have it all” and “have it now” types.  This is why I believe that most people in their heart of hearts really just want to be RICH and that’s okay to in my book…as long as everyone is honest.

Being rich simply involves making more money so you can buy more things.  It has nothing to do with net worth.  People who want to be rich are motivated by the “stuff” they will get when they become richer.  It’s the stuff that gets them to work harder and longer hours at jobs they don’t particularly care for or in careers that aren’t directly in tune with their passions and unique talents.

Wealthy people, I believe are motivated by another thing all together – financial independence. They are motivated by the freedom that comes from having a “F-U fund” and the security that comes from knowing they have no debt and can quit their jobs tomorrow and still be okay.  This is not to say that wealthy people don’t like or have nice things.  Indeed, many do. But I digress…

The authors of The Millionaire Next Door identified 7 Key Traits of the Wealthy listed below.  How many do you posses?

1. They live well below their means.

2. They allocate their time, energy, and money efficiently, in ways conducive to building wealth.

3. They believe that financial independence is more important than displaying high social status.

4. Their parents did not provide money handouts.

5. Their adult children are economically self-sufficient.

6. They are proficient in targeting market opportunities.

7. They chose the right occupation.

Success

Have you heard the song Successful by Drake and Trey Songz?  I am really feeling this song. Not just because it has a great beat or because of Drake’s clever lyrics, I like it because it articulates a very simple yet powerful concept that resonates with so many. That is our desire to be successful.

It doesn’t matter if your definition of success includes “money, cars and clothes” like Trey’s does.  Your definition of success can be 100% non-material and you can still relate to this song.

What is your personal definition of success?

I define success by having the ability to do whatever I want, whenever I want without having to worry about money.  So to me success  = financial independence.  Success also means having control over my time so that I can spend it with family and friends and doing work that is meaningful, positive and rewarding.  That is why I am always looking for ways to decouple the amount of money I make from the amount of time I have to spend generating that revenue.

While I have an extremely strong desire to be successful, for many years I took a passive vs. an active approach to actually securing my financial future.  Yes, I did all the traditional things you are “supposed” to like go to college and grad school and  get a good job, max out my 401K and work extra hard to get that promotion.  But when it came down to articulating a clear plan for how I was going to leverage my finances, position and network to gain financial independence (outside of working myself to death), I had no clue and neither did many of my friends.  I was content collecting a paycheck, paying my bills on time and spending the rest on whatever caught my interest at the time.

Then, one day, all of a sudden my job and the paycheck weren’t enough.  I was no longer content just being a Vice President at [fill in the blank] firm. I knew I had something special to give to the world and knew that there was something unique that I was meant to do beyond my current job.  I just hadn’t figured it out yet.

Then one day I came across this game in a book  called Finding Your North Star by Martha Beck, Ph.D. (Three Rivers Press).   The “Interview Game,” basically is a visualization game that asks the reader to pretend that they are several decades in the future and that they are being interviewed by a magazine for which they are to be the cover story.

The “game” requires that you answer a series of questions that make you really think about success on specific terms.  Here are a few of the questions:

1. What magazine are you being interviewed for? Why do the readers want to know about you? What do they want to know about you?

2. The interviewer asks about your romantic life, how do you describe it?

3. The interviewer asks about some photographs in your home, who or what is in them?

4. Does the article mention any children, or perhaps your decision not to have any?

5. The author writes a good deal about your best known achievement.  What is it?

6. The interviewer asks you what advice you would have given to a younger version of yourself.  What’s your answer?

Some of you may be wondering what all this has to do with personal finances…well, I am strong believer that you can’t get to where you want to go unless you know where you are going.  For that reason it is important that we take time to really get clear on what we want out of life.  If we keep our personal vision of success at the forefront of our minds, we are less likely to get caught up in the rat race chasing the ‘ol mighty dollar and loosing sight of our bigger dreams.

Try the visualization game yourself and let me know what it tells you about your definition of success and how your career/relationships/time allocation need to change or stay the same to achieve that vision.

At the end of the day we all just want to be successful, but just wanting success is not enough, we need to plan for it. Let’s start together, today.

Flossin’

I’ll be the first to admit that I am guilty of flossin’ every now and then. You know, like those times when I stayed at a ritzy hotel on the company and walked through the hotel corridors with my head up high as if staying at the St. Regis was just what I did on a regular.  When in reality if it were on my own dime, I would be more likely to stay at whatever three star hotel Orbitz had on sale that week.

That being said, I think our friend Mario (the R&B singer with the new hit song “Breakup“) crossed the line a bit when he filmed an episode of  MTV Cribs at a penthouse  in Baltimore in a condo that he didn’t even own.  In fact, no one owns the condo – it is a model unit for a building currently being marketed in Baltimore called Silo Point.  What really gets me is how he starts talking about the artwork and window features in the unit like he actually picked them out! Oh, the deception!

Call me naive but I thought that stars actually had to own, or at a minimum LIVE in the homes that they flossed on Cribs.   I was bummed when I found out that some of the folks I may have been envious of or obsessed with because of their glamourous lifestyles may just be frontin’.  As if!

I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, after all it is entertainment and the whole industry is based on illusions and fantasy worlds.  Reference any rap video which shows a bunch of half-naked women gyrating on overweight, nominally attractive rappers blowing cigar smoke in their faces for further evidence of this point.  Here’s a good one.

While I am fully aware of this, I will admit that sometimes I forget and get lost in the fantasy mistaking it for reality.  For a moment, I envy Rihanna (everything except for the Chris Breezy incident of course) and her fly haircuts, neon nails and ripped jeans and my heart starts to beat faster when I close my eyes and think about rolling up to the MTV Music Awards as part of her entourage.  What girl hasn’t fantasized about being swept off her feet to some unknown island by the likes of Boris Kodjoe or Idris Elba or both!

Of course, I don’t know anything about these people except for the fantasy world they share with me and millions of others on TV.  Heck for all I know Boris could be dumb as a doorknob and Idris could have chronic halitosis!  But in my mind all these stars are perfectly sane and perfectly well…perfect!

The moral of the story: We should all STOP flossin.  “But it’s so fun!” you say.  I know, I know.  This is much, much easier said than done.  But just think…if they are flossin and we are flossin, who the heck are we all trying to impress??? Who are we spending all this money on to befriend, make envious, jealous etc.???  If the answer to that question isn’t a resounding “NO ONE !” then we really need to re-evaluate why we do what we do.

Now don’t get me wrong, in my book there is nothing wrong at all with buying yourself a new Gucci bag or new pair of Jimmy Choo’s just because they make you feel good or because you “deserve” them (assuming you can afford these items of course).  More power to you!  There also isn’t anything wrong with spending your hard earned cash buying tables, popping bottles and booking rooms at the St. Regis – hey you can even order room service for all I care.

There is something wrong, however with frontin’ like you have money you don’t and living beyond your means to impress others or to make others feel like you are better than them.  That is a no-no and in the end it only results in you/us fooling y/ourselves.

So don’t go out like Mario.  Keep it real and be true to you.  That’s always a good look.