9 Steps To Financial Freedom - Step 9

 

RECOGNIZING  TRUE  WEALTH

NOW IT IS TIME to answer the question, What is true wealth, true financial

freedom? This question is the real bottom line of life and each one of us must address it, regardless of the bottom line that shows up each month on our bank statements. Why? Because the quality of our lives does not depend only on how we accumulate, save, and spend our money. True financial freedom lies in defining ourselves by who and what we are, not by what we do or do not have. You are the person you are right now. We cannot measure our self-worth by our net worth.

 

RUTH’S STORY

 I have a friend named Ruth whom I love dearly. Now ninety-four years old, she’s the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever met. She received her Ph.D. in ancient Greek literature from Yale at a time when that was still a rare achievement for a woman, and has spent her life learning, teaching, reading, and living.

She was married for most of her life to Leon, whom she loved deeply. After he died some years ago, she came to me for financial advice. For all her education, she had always left their finances to Leon, and she knew that now she would have to take control herself. After we added  all the numbers, she understood that she had far more money than she had imagined she would. She seemed relieved at the news but strangely untouched by it; her money, I would come to learn, has very little to do with who Ruth is.

As our friendship grew, she and I would discuss her finances—and everything else under the sun—every single Wednesday over lunch. There is not a thing that, to this day, I can’t talk to Ruth about. She is so wise, so profoundly contented with who she is, that simply being in her presence restores me in a way that’s hard to describe in words. I feel that she lives in a state of grace, and that whoever is in her presence is touched by it, too.

In recent years, Ruth grew weaker and she finally decided to give up her apartment. She chose to move into a life-care community, where you deposit a large sum of money, pay a monthly maintenance, and receive whatever nursing or medical care you need. We had invested well over the years, and Ruth had more than enough money to stay in her own house with live-in nursing care, which was what I had thought  she would want to do—but her inner voice told her she wanted the home. We packed her books and journals, some souvenirs from her travels, her photographs, her tapes of Leon’s lectures, all the things that matter to her, and she moved in.

Ruth to this very day still exudes that state of contentment, of grace, which makes her seem stronger, as if her body weren’t beginning to fail her. Her nieces visit her, as do the friends she has still and some of her former students. Not long ago, I asked her how it felt to be growing more frail. “Suze,” she said, “my future is so tiny and my past and present are so rich. It surprises me to say this, but I’m not afraid. I’m truly happy and content just as I am.” I believed her absolutely.

Ruth’s freedom is in the life she has led and the love she knows now. Within herself she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that she is rich, not just in money, but in the realm of true wealth, where nothing she has can be taken away from her. Though she’s in weakening health, at ninety-four, every day she feels rich and free, even strong—and the irony is that her real wealth has nothing to do with her money.

If you today could foresee your last days, if you were on your

deathbed right now—and one day you will be, believe me—do you think you would be there wishing you had more money? Or wishing that you were vastly rich in the way my friend Ruth is?

 

YOUR EXERCISE

 

Please find a time when you will be alone in your house for at least an hour. While everyone is gone, spend that hour inhabiting, really inhabiting, your house. Pretend, for a while, that your house is a store. Walk around, and imagine that you were going to be putting a price tag on every item in this store. You know what you paid, when they were brand-new, for your sofa, refrigerator, washing machine, dining room table, dresser, and three-year-old car. What do you think they would be worth now? Affix the imaginary price tags to these items based on what they would be worth today if your life really were a store.

Now stop to examine the items that really matter to you, the items that resonate with meaning and memories, the items that tug at your heartstrings. Those tools your dad wanted you to have when he died. The funny lamp you and your first lover bought when you fell in love and thought, in those days, that anything was possible. Your small daughter’s stuffed animals, all lined up on a shelf. Family photos. A wedding ring. The painting over the mantel that was the first art you ever bought. Your mother’s jewelry box and porcelain teapot. Your diary. The scuffed-up desk you’ve worked at since you were a teenager.

What kind of a price tag would you put on these items? What you’re really asking is, What kind of price tag can you put on your life?

NINE STEPS - A REVIEW

The world of money, of numbers and stock markets and interest rates and credit cards, seems on the surface about as far as it could be from the world of spirituality, of seeking meaningful answers to the big questions of life. Imagine how it feels to be on a noisy trading floor on Wall Street. Imagine instead how it feels to be alone in a quiet place of worship. But these two worlds must flow in and out of each other, because it takes both money and spiritual understanding to sustain us. Truly speaking, what determines where our money with its awesome power will go, and what it will do for ourselves and others? If we listen, those answers come from the center of our being, from who we really are.

We have learned how powerful a force money is, how it can create fears that will, if we let them, paralyze us in this life. And we have learned how to silence these fears, and put them behind us. We have learned about the dharma of money, the essential right actions that, once we take them, will put our money, and with it, each and every one of us, in step with the natural order of things, on a course with what comes next, and what comes after that. Most important, we have learned an essential lesson about abundance—that abundance is in crucial ways a state of mind. Our money will see us through this life, and even has the power to live on after we are gone, seeing the people we  love through their lives, too, and even on into generations we will never know.

Once we  have  taken  care  of  the  people  we  love,  it  is  worthy  to accumulate money, and in this book we have learned how to attract and create great fortunes. With the responsibility of accumulating money, however, comes the equally urgent responsibility of using money wisely, taking satisfaction in what it can do, knowing as well what it can’t do. Very rich people who take no pleasure in their money and who never share their bounty will never be financially free. People with much, much less, who do take immense pleasure in what they have so carefully created, will in the end be far freer.

I hope that this book will remind you of the richness and worthiness that have been in your life all along, and I hope, too, that this book will help you to create more wealth, to sustain you and those you love. I would like to think that you’ve written notes to yourself in it, turned down the pages that were useful to you, and marked passages that you might want to turn to again later. But this book alone will not make you financially free. Money itself cannot make you financially free. Only you can make yourself financially free, and you can do it—and so much more. You have that power.

 Now it is time for this book to end, and for your future to begin. Believe these lessons; live them, for financial freedom is within your reach. I wish you abundance, joy, and true wealth—of all kinds.

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Martin Luther King

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