Suffering from Affluenza?

Answer the following questions to see how you are doing with your personal finances

1. Do you have a written budget where you consciously and specifically allocate each dollar of income to spending, saving and investing before the month begins?
2. Do you save money for irregular, annual, bi-annual or quarterly expenses like car repairs, gifts or insurance?
3. Do you have medical insurance, short-term disability and long-term disability insurance and life insurance?
4. Do you have an emergency fund equal to three to six months of your living expenses?
5. Are you spending less than 35 percent of your take home pay on housing (rent, mortgage, property taxes, HOA fees)?
6. Do you only pay for purchases with cash or debit cards?
7. Are you investing 15 percent of your take home pay for the purpose of achieving financial independence?
8. Are you saving for your children’s college fund at a rate that will allow them to attend a four-year institution without taking on student loans?
9. Are you paying on your mortgage at a rate that will allow you to pay it off in 15 or fewer years?
10. Do you work at your job because it is your passion?
11. Has it been more than three months since have you worried about money?
12. Do you have a dream toward which you are moving consciously and deliberately?  If you have a partner, is it a shared dream?

If you answered “no” to one or more of these questions, you would benefit from some effective personal finance planning or coaching.

1. Serve the wants and needs of others.
2. Create happiness for others and yourself.
3. Practice servant leadership*.
4. Fulfill your needs and wants by helping others fulfill their own needs and wants.
5. Participate only in Win-Win transactions.
6. Focus all of your thoughts, words, emotions and actions on contributing to your personal success and the success of others.

*The term servant leadership was coined and defined by Robert Greenleaf, in his classic essay, The Servant as Leader, described the servant-leader in this manner:

The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?