Welcome to Step 1 of the Money Boot Camp Preliminary to Becoming a Millionster

Before you take a strangle-hold on money, it is prudent to analyze the situation you’re in and recognize the things that have brought you to be in a state of “money chaos.” In the financial blog community you’ll see a number of tips telling you to track your spending and build a budget, but really none of that is going to help you UNTIL you understand the bigger problem: You

You are the cause of your own demise, and in contrast the key to your success. Everything you are, have and do, begins and ends with you. (see Self Awareness)

Lack of Knowledge
Imagine living in an abstract world. A world where nothing around you has labels or names, where things are perceived but seldom understood. This is not unlike the experience that many people have in managing their financial world.

Growing up you most likely learned to save your money away for rainy days from your Baby Boomer parents, (whose parents were Great Depression parents) — or if you lived on a farm or a poor community you learned the value of good old fashioned hard work. But what you didn’t learn in your first 25 years of life– things like banking, budgeting, credit, long term saving, the power of interest rates etc., has largely come back to bite you in the buttocks in the form of (among other things) increasing debt, bad credit, and no savings. You work hard and squeeze your pennies, but you get no where.
By the time you start to figure things out you will be in such a financial grave that you’ll have little room (after 2 or 3 kids and a round of welfare) to be anything else but poor for the rest of your life. Or maybe you’ve had some good luck but made one really bad financial choice that left you in ruin. No matter the situation, the fact remains, financial literacy means the difference between wealthy and broke. With so much at stake you’d think that the great institutions would invest more into teaching financial literacy, but sadly this is not so. (I’m starting to soung like Rich Dad, Poor Dad)

Financial literacy can easily transform the bewildering abstractions of time and money into something you can actually undersand. Taking control of your finances by learning and understanding the institutions, principles and systems is an essential step to becoming successful in life.

Where you start depends on where you’re at in your financial journey, and by reading Millionster, you’ve already augmented your toolset by acquainting yourself with someone that has the same goals as you!