Listen Money Matters - Free your inner financial badass. All the stuff you should know about personal finance.

Whether you believe it or not, we have all heard the age old saying money can’t buy happiness, but there certainly is a relationship between your personal finances and your happiness. Maybe it’s time to change your mindset. People who earn a more are often happier than people who live in poverty, but it’s not just about the money itself. It is about providing insurance that you and your family can live a comfortable life no matter what life throws at you. Many of us think we only need so much to be happy, but you have no way of knowing how much you’ll need at some point in the future. Today the guys talk about how to change your mindset from “how much I need” to “how much is possible”. It doesn’t mean you have to constantly think about money or compromise your other values and interests, but you can simply think differently about your money. It’ll start to shift your choices. Unless you can predict the future, you do not know what you will need or want beyond today. Building your financial resources will help you deal with life’s uncertainties. Money takes time to grow, so you need to start now. Even if you have a job that pays well, the chances are it doesn’t pay quite enough to create financial independence. Your job is your job but building financial wealth is something else. Show Notes LMM Community: Join the conversation! The Millionaire Real Estate Investor: Thomas’ latest read Lapsang Souchong: The whiskey of teas   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  It’s been too long since we’ve done a five questions episode. Today we talk about lotto, stock games, APR, diversification, and student loans. Five questions are back! We answer questions we get through e-mail and the LMM Community. 1. What would you do if you won the lottery? Thomas doesn’t want money he didn’t earn so if he somehow won the lottery, he would hand it over to various charities. Andrew actually did buy tickets, $20 worth. He thinks winning the lottery would ruin his life because it would take away his drive and his purpose. He would keep his job and just stick the money in US Treasury bonds which are one of the safest investments you can make. Even with the low-interest rate on bonds of about 2%, taking the lump sum of the recent Power Ball would still earn $1.2 million per month.  2. Do you recommend any on-line stock simulator games for those new to investing? Motley Fool has a good one. Most games focus on the dollar value but Caps, the Motley Fool game, removes that and base wins on percentage gain instead. The community is very active too, and it’s a good place to research stocks. People do reports and even blog about their picks. Investopedia has a simulator, and you can track stocks in Google Finance where you can create folders for your picks and track them over time. 3. I have $9,000 in credit card debt and a 15 month 0% APR. Should I take out a loan through Lending Club to pay this off? If you roll a balance over to a 0% APR card, there is a fee. Even with zero interest, you have to make the payment each month, or it triggers the interest. Pay off that $9,000 as fast as possible, ideally, before the 0% runs out because no loan is going to give you 0% interest. For more on APR check out this guide. If you can’t pay it back within the 15 months, then Lending Club is a good option. 4. I have an IRA with Fidelity. What should I do to diversify my investments? The Fidelity account you have has a high expense ratio. Even a 1% fee over thirty years of investing means a loss of more than a quarter of your investments. Fees are a killer. A 1% fee doesn’t sound like much, but over time, it is. A better Life Cycle Fund would be with Vanguard because no one beats their fees. If you don’t want to do a ton of research and compare funds, Betterment is the way to go. 5. I know it’s important to pay off debt before investing but is that still true if my student loan debt will be forgiven in twenty years? The interest is high at 6%, and while you’re on the income-based repayment plan, your income will (hopefully) increase over that time. Because interest is one of life’s biggest expenses, pay it off. Build your emergency fund up to six to twelve months worth of expenses and then start killing the loans. Thanks for the questions everyone! Show Notes LMM Community: If you want personal answers to more money questions, join us in the Community.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s the time of year to reflect on the past twelve months and set goals for the new year. What does figure skating have to do with it? Tune in to find out. At LMM we prefer the word “goals” to “resolution.” Resolution has almost come to mean failure in three weeks time. We think framing our resolutions as goals will help us reach them. Sometimes you just have to trick your brain! Why January 1? You can see the appeal. Everyone likes a clean slate and the slate is never cleaner than it is on January 1. But what if you woke up with a hangover and despite resolving to eat more healthfully, you order breakfast from McDonald’s? Are you going to wait 364 days to try again? Of course not. You don’t have to wait for a certain day to change a habit. Year End Review Rather than making the same old tired resolutions, which at a certain point become traditions, look back at the year that just passed. What would you have liked to do better? What did you not manage to get to at all that you still want to pursue? If you did achieve some goals, what helped you to do so? By looking back at this things, we can better craft goals for the new year and put systems in place to help us reach them. Day, Week, Month If the goals are too vague, “save money,” lose weight,” they are hard to track and hard to work towards. Each day, week, and month should have things to do in order to reach the end goal. If you want to save money, how much money? If you want to save $1000 to start an emergency fund, you can have a daily goal of not buying coffee on your way to work. You can have a weekly goal of bringing lunch from home just three of five days a week (because you want some wiggle room or you’ll get sick of it and give up). You can have a monthly goal of cutting your grocery bill by 20%. Any goal you set for yourself should have a timeline and a deadline. Marking off time in smaller chunks like day, week, and month helps you to move forward and track your progress. If you get to the end of the day, week, or month, and haven’t achieved what you set out to, you can reassess before much larger chunks of time have passed so you’re not content with giving up and waiting for that clean slate of January 1 to come around again. Priority(ies) Priority: “Something that is more important than other things and that needs to be done or dealt with first.” That definition makes perfect sense. A priority is the most important thing. So how can you have more than one? You can’t but somehow, we all do. And that’s why so many of us fail to achieve our priority because we spread our focus across multiple priorities. This year make it a goal to do almost nothing. But do a small number of things that matter. Those two statements might seem contradictory, but not as contradictory as having more than one priority. Some Goals Can Be Fun! Not all of your goals have to be a slog. Saving money and losing weight, while wonderful things to do that will reward you in many ways for many years, are not really very fun things to do. So pick at least one goal that is fun to do. For Thomas, it was to have more fun after work. A lot of us can probably relate to this. You come home from work and make dinner, tidy up, pay bills, watch TV. Except for making dinner, for some of us at least, none of those things are fun. So Thomas signed up and paid for, an ice skating class. A goal like this can kill a few birds; the original of doing more fun stuff after work, because another friend has signed up, Thomas gets to spend more time socializing, and skating is good exercise, although I know he was already doing pretty well in that area. If you can find a way to wrap up a few goals into one, you’ll get more done in less time. No Is A Complete Sentence Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Want to level up your life? Steve Kamb from Nerd Fitness joins us to discuss turning your life into a game. We’ve discussed the ways being physically fit and financially fit are similar. Steve Kamb learned that when he started Nerd Fitness. His health improved alongside his finances. He turned his life into a video game with himself as the protagonist. Now he’s written a book on how we can do that too, Level Up Your Life. Nerd Fitness Steve was working a sales job he hated and wasn’t very good at when he saw Tim Ferris’s book, The Four Hour Work Week. In the book, Ferris details how to start a very small company that solves a problem that a lot of people have. Steve was becoming increasingly interested in fitness and if there is a problem a lot of people have, (aside from money problems. LMM will handle those) it’s being unfit and unhealthy. As with any good side hustle, you need to find a niche. There are a lot of fitness sites out there. There aren’t a lot of fitness sites geared toward people who love video games. Steve bought his domain at Hostgator and sat on it for a year. He didn’t know the first thing about building a website. After a new job, Steve decided to make the leap and start really working on Nerd Fitness. He quit his job with about eight weeks of runway money and 3,000 subscribers. He wrote an e-book that sold enough copies to keep the lights on and he worked a series of odd jobs to fill in the gaps. He was right to make the leap. Within six months, the site was generating $2-3 a month. Motivation Is Not Enough The problem with motivation and willpower is that they’re fleeting. We’re all motivated in the new year to save money, lose weight, quit smoking. We all have the willpower to resist the cookies in the beginning. How motivated are you in February? How many cookies did you eat in March? Steve advocates putting systems in place that will help you succeed. He wanted to spend less time watching television and more time working on the site, so he got rid of cable. He would eat the entire bag of chips in one sitting so he stopped buying chips. People are lazy, we really are! Of course, you can leave the house at 9:00 pm to procure the chips, but you probably won’t. No motivation or discipline needed for this strategy. You have a system in place that supports your goals. Anti-Fragile Antifragile by Nassim Taleb teaches that not all chaos is bad. There are three types of things; fragile things that break when you drop them, sturdy things that survive the fall intact, and antigragile things that get stronger from the impact. Steve applied this to fitness. Throwing the unexpected, the chaos, at your body strengthens it and makes it grow. The same theory can help improve your life too. Pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone makes you a stronger, better person. Steve drew up a list of things he wanted to accomplish, a bucket list and published it so his readers would help keep him accountable. He made conquering the list a game. Every time he crossed something off, he awarded himself points and moved to the next thing on the list. Success Through Habits Thomas is a big believer in the power of habit too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Look at your family, just sitting there costing you money. Slackers should be making you money, pulling their weight! We found a way to do it. We will show you how to turn your family into a profitable business with Natali Morris. Incorporate Your Family The tax system is not set up to benefit the individual; it’s set up to benefit businesses because businesses drive the economy. That’s why eleven companies on the S&P 500 who made profits last year paid less in income tax than you. How much less? Well, they paid nothing. If you want to get in on that, incorporate. Set up an LLC, S-Corp, whatever is the most appropriate for your situation. What if you don’t have a business? Well, you might and not realize it. Do you babysit, clean houses, mow lawns? Because if you do, you set up and LLC or S-Corp. No? Well, start! And incorporate your hobby, side hustle. However, you term it, as a business. Remember what Adam Carroll told us in last week’s episode? The two most significant expenses in life are taxes and interest. Incorporating your family is one way to maximize those tax savings. Teach Kids About Money Children have established their ideas and habits about money by the age of seven! So the earlier you start teaching them about money, the better. For the most part, many of us can afford to give our kids almost anything they want, at least when their they’re little. We can afford the stuffed animals and the action figures. That’s why it’s important to put a system in place to help them understand what money is and how it works. Natali gives her children an allowance but not in the traditional sense. Each kid has responsibilities that come with being part of a family; keeping communal areas and their own rooms clean. Taking care of their possessions. If she wants them to do work for her, washing her car, for example, they are paid for those kinds of things. The kids also have real jobs, things like helping Mom scan and then shred documents, that pay them from the family’s LLC, and they pay taxes on those earnings. Because the money is taxed, it’s eligible for an IRA, and that’s where it goes. The IRA’s are Roth which means they only pay taxes on them during the years they contribute. The children are given three, clear glass jars. The clear part is important; it lets kids see the money accumulating, something they won’t get using a traditional “piggy bank. “The jars are “give,” “save,” and “spend.” The kids can buy whatever they want with the spend jar money, even if Mom knows they’ll lose interest in five minutes. It teaches that once the money is spent, it’s gone, so make it count. Self Directed IRA A self-directed IRA is a retirement account that gives you control over your investment choices. You’re not limited to stocks, bonds, or mutual funds. This allows you to invest in alternative assets like real estate, limited partnerships, and gold through your self-directed retirement account. These IRA’s are more work than the average IRA, but the advantages can outweigh that for some. Natali buys rental property through her IRA, the proceeds come back into it and all expenses, property management fees, repairs, utilities, are paid out of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam Carroll joins us to discuss how to actually save thousands on your mortgage with home equity lines of credit. When we interviewed Adam for our new Rich Tips series, he mentioned how he is paying off his mortgage years ahead of schedule and saving thousands of dollars in interest. We were intrigued and asked him to join us to explain his strategy in greater detail. What Is A Home Equity Line Of Credit? A home equity line of credit, HELOC, is “An open ended line of credit extended to a homeowner that uses the borrower’s home as collateral. Once a maximum loan balance is established, the homeowner may draw on the line of credit at his or her discretion. Interest is charged on a predetermined variable rate, which is usually based on prevailing prime rates.” Most institutions will lend up to about 90% of loan to value.StrategyAdam has an ingenious use for his HELOC and you can use his strategy too. The HELOC is used as a checking account. All of your income is deposited into it and all of your expenses are paid out of it.Depositing your paycheck into the HELOC acts like a payment so you aren’t adding a monthly payment. The money left over at the end of the month gets sent to the mortgage. What this does is send a massive payment to your mortgage each month.The trick to make this work though is that you have to make more than you spend. Let’s look at an example: You bought a home for $100,000 with a $20,000 down payment. You can immediately take out a HELOC for $10,000. You then put that toward your mortgage.In order for this to work though, you must make more than you spend. You make $5,000, spend $4,000 and have $1,000 left. That $1,000 goes into the HELOC until it’s paid off, so for ten months. Let’s say your interest rate is 5%. So that’s $500 over 12 months, $41.33 the first month in interest but when the income goes in, you’re paying a little less each month because you’re slowly paying the loan down with that $1,000 a month.Rather than taking ten months to pay off, it takes around 7. And because your mortgage went from $80,000 to $70,000, you will pay less interest not just over ten months but over the entire life of the loan.What If You Don’t Own A Home?You can still use a similar strategy if you don’t own a home. You can get a personal line of credit, PLOC. A PLOC is “A loan that you use like a credit card account that you access without using a card. Instead, you write special checks or request a transfer to your checking account by phone or online. You have a credit limit, receive a monthly bill, make at least a minimum payment, pay interest based on your outstanding balance, and possibly pay a fee each time you use the account. PLOC are unsecured, unlike HELOCs, which are backed by a mortgage on your home. PLOCs are offered by banks and credit unions and usually require that you also have a checking account with the same institution.”PLOCs have their drawbacks. The interest rate is higher than a HELOC and the interest is not tax deductible. But if you have high-interest debt and don’t own a home, they can be beneficial.What Keeps Us In DebtIt’s the way we bank and borrow. Taking out a 30 year mortgage is just SOP in the United States. Amortization is the process of paying off a debt, like a mortgage over time with regular payments. An amortization schedule is a table detailing each periodic payment on an that loan.We borrowed $80,000 to buy our home above. With a 30 year mortgage at 3.5%, you will pay $50,000 in interest when it’s all over! Your first mortgage payment will be $359, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ace Chapman joins us to explain how to buy a business. Something he’s been doing for sixteen years and it’s made him a millionaire. Ace was on the usual college path when the opportunity to buy a business fell into his lap. He was playing with an online stock simulator that crashed a lot and found the company unresponsive. He reached out with an offer to help, merely hoping for an internship. Instead, he was offered the chance to buy the business for $70,000. Ace had just $3,000. What he also had was no idea how such transactions usually work so he asked if the sellers would finance half of the deal. They agreed!  Ace got some money from a similarly entrepreneurial minded friend and financed the rest of credit cards. Ace grew the product from 10,000 members to 250,000. He turned down seven-figure offers to sell but lost it all in the first dot-com bust. But he had a school of hard knocks bestowed MBA and decided to buy businesses was what he wanted to do. Due Diligence Ace had a big advantage when he bought that first business; he had been a long time user of the product so he knew it well. He had spoken to many of its other customers to find out what they did and did not like about the product. It’s not a requirement but it will certainly give you a leg up when it comes time to take over running the business. Why Are They Selling? If this business is so great, why are the owners looking to get out? It could be one of a million reasons; a divorce, failing health, boredom and the desire to move onto the next thing. As the Boomers start thinking of retirement, there will be a lot of established businesses on the market. Don’t Start From Scratch Many people don’t really give much thought to buying an already existing business. Starting your own business is something that is woven into the American Dream and we all think we could be the next Bill Gates. But the stark truth is that about half of new businesses fail within five years. So why not let someone else do the hard work and pour in the capital that the early years of a new business require? Where To Find An Opportunity You aren’t very likely to walk into a business and see a for sale sign in the window. There are some sites that have listings like bizbuysell, but the large majority of businesses for sale don’t advertise that way. You can advertise though, that you’re looking for a business to buy. Let them come to you.  So you have to hunt around for something to buy. Because some businesses are sold due to things like death and divorce, attorneys who handle divorces and estates are a good resource to find an opportunity. The sellers in these situations may be highly motivated which can net you a bargain. Attend events related to the industry you’re interested in, meetups, conferences, seminars and use them as an opportunity to network. The pay off may not be immediate; Ace once bought a business that he had sent a letter to the owners of four years after he sent it. But the owners kept the letter and when they were ready to sell, Ace is the person they called. The lesson is to have a long-term view. The Valuation The formula Ace uses when deciding what a business is worth is to multiply the net monthly earnings by two. He likes to employee opportunistic due diligence to find a way to buy at two times but within a few months, increases the revenue by four times. There are a few things to look for that can make this possible, the business has a hidden asset, a unique opportunity or can be part of a joint venture with someone else in his network of clients.  Face Of Business Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our listener Eric has made an appearance in the past to school us on bonds. Today he’s back to teach us about inflation. What Is Inflation? Economic concepts can be broken down into the micro and the macro. Micro looks at the smaller picture concerning the behaviors of individual consumers and businesses. Macro is the study of the economy as a whole and where inflation falls. Inflation is one economic concept that most of us see on a regular basis. It’s the purchasing power of your money, the general increase of the cost of goods and services over a specified period of time. Your dollar that is worth X today will not be worth X five years from now. Consumer Price Index One of the best measures of inflation is consumer price index. CPI measures changes in price of a set of consumer goods and services purchased by households. There are eight major groups that include the costs of things like cereal, rent, dresses, gas, prescription drugs, televisions, college tuition and funeral expenses. The Big Mac index was founded as an informal way to compare purchasing power between different currencies but has been expanded to include the amount of time someone has to work in order to buy a Big Mac. Demand Pull Inflation In most cases, we want inflation to increase, but not too steeply. Controlled inflation can erode the cost of debt. Good inflation is known as demand pull inflation and happens during periods of economic growth and increased income. Consumer demand increases. Wartime is a good example. Who buys a lot during wartime? The government and it buys from the private sector. When a big order comes in to Lockheed Martin, the company hires more workers. More people have money and they too, spend money in the private sector buying cars and homes and electronics. Cost Push Inflation Cost push inflation is the “bad” kind of inflation. A good example would be when there is a drought. There is less food available which causes price increases. The producer has to make money but they have less product to sell. So what do they do? They raise the price. The ongoing drought in California and the water restrictions being imposed because of it, are going to make rice more expensive. California is the country’s second biggest rice producer(who knew!) and will grow 25% less than last year. So your sushi is going to get more expensive. Federal Funds Target Rate The federal funds target rate is “the interest rate at which a depository institution lends funds maintained at the Federal Reserve to another depository institution overnight.” The higher the federal funds rate, the more expensive it is to borrow money. The Federal Open Market Committee meets eight times per year to set key interest rates. Stagnant Wages Inflation has been low, but our wages have been stagnant for decades. After adjusting for inflation, today’s average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power as it did in 1979. Productivity and Gross Domestic Product have increased, but wages for the average worker have not. This stagnation is one of the reasons the Fed has been reluctant to raise rates. Deflation Deflation is a drop in consumer prices and measured using the CPI. This sounds like a good thing for consumers but is a sign of a long term decrease in demand and signals that a recession is probably already happening. Manufacturers and sellers of goods start cutting prices and if this goes on long enough, it also means they will cut employee wages or even go out of business entirely. Disinflation Disinflation is the slow down in the rate of inflation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we interview Bobby Monks and Justin Jaffy about their book, Uninvested and understanding the pitfalls of Wall Street. Bobby Monks calls himself a “chronic entrepreneur” and as such, understands the dirty dealings happening on Wall Street and how they effect the average investor. Justin was new to the subject of finance but a journalist who wanted to know more. Together with a third author, Bree LaCasse, they wrote Uninvested: How Wall Street Hijacks Your Money and How to Fight Back. The Book To the average person, investing seems like this complicated thing that no lay person can possibly understand. So they hand their money over to a “financial advisor.” The authors wanted to demystify investing for the average investor using simple language. They spent four years interviewing people like Barney Frank, Jack Bogle, Carl Icahn, mutual and hedge fund managers. Financial Advisors There are 450,000 people providing financial services in the United States and 90% of them are sales people. Just 10% are registered investment advisors. What’s wrong with that? When you go to a car dealership, 100% of the people are sales people. The difference is that you know the person trying to sell you a car is a sales person. The standards for most of these advisers is low. They are under no obligation to put the best interests of their clients first and many of them don’t. Their priority is making money for the company they work for. There is a lot of confusion among consumers about who is and who is not a sales person in the realm of financial advisors. Financial advice that is skewed by a conflict of interest costs investors $17 billion a year. If you were a paranoid person it might be enough to make you think the industry has been deliberately set up this way. The Fiduciary Standard The fiduciary standard was established as part of the Investment Advisors Act of 1940. Investment advisors are regulated and required to put client interests above their own. Investment brokers are only held to a standard of “suitability.” Under this standard, a broker can look at two funds which are similar but still recommend the more costly one that will also give him or her a higher commission. Brokers are paid based on the dollar amount of assets they manage so there isn’t necessarily any incentive to recommend the best investments, just to get the highest amount of assets under management. They often still get paid even if they lose you money. Isn’t More Expensive Better? If one financial advisor is more expensive than the others, doesn’t that mean he or she is better, smarter, more educated? Not in this case but it’s a common fallacy. None of these people can predict the future and past experience does not indicate future experience. The more fees you pay, the less money you have. Generally, the lower the fee, the better the performance of your portfolio. The Retirement System Many workers used to have a defined benefit system, a pension basically, that paid a certain amount of income for life after retirement. The system went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the government. That system has largely been replaced by the one we have now, which relies heavily on 401k’s and IRA’s. But it’s expensive to manage a 401k and you’re paying for that. The average fee is over 2%. That doesn’t sound like much does it, a 2% fee? Consider this; if you have $25,000 invested over 35 years with an average yield of 7% and a fee of just 1%, that will cost you $65,000. The fees are often obscured because people tend to focus on the employer match and the tax advantages. Index Funds And Individual Stocks The best way to increase the chances of a good return over time is to pay the lowest fees possible. The lowest fee way to invest is to buy individua... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we interview Joan Sotkin of Prosperity Place, who approaches money in a holistic way. Because listen, emotion matters when it comes to money. Joan’s Story Joan comes from a family of compulsive debtors. She was born in 1940, a time when women’s roles were pretty prescribed. Joan got married and started on the prescribed path. She became a teacher but didn’t like teaching any more than she liked being married. She felt out of place. Looking for something else, she started studying what she terms, “woo woo stuff,” like astrology and healing crystals. In the 1980’s she began selling crystals and minerals for healing and meditation and was making great money. In 2015 money, she was bringing in $50,000 a month! And then she went bankrupt. Joan didn’t know how to manage cash flow. Her father died and she has since learned that people often deal with a big trauma by overspending. Her field started to grow and she didn’t know how to compete. Eventually, the business closed. Early Adopter In 1995 Joan discovered online business and taught herself how to build websites. A year later she moved to Santa Fe with $200 and whatever possessions fit in her car. In 1997 she started Prosperity Place. It’s a place for her to teach people what she learned from her mistakes and successes. Joan was an early podcaster too. She started podcasting in 2005. When Word Press came out she started building websites for other people. Insanity Defined Joan found that old saying, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result” to be true. She sees people acting out emotions through business and financial decisions over and over. You have to get in touch with your emotions in order to sustain success. We can know intellectually what to do but it still has to be done by a person (us) and a person can get in the way of doing it. Money And Emotion Our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions are what form our decisions. If you’ve had emotional issues in childhood, they sometimes manifest themselves in the decisions we make. If certain needs aren’t met, we feel deprived. If there is abuse or neglect, there is a feeling of being trapped in a situation. These emotions have to be expressed one way or another. That way can be healthy or it can be unhealthy. If your “story” is always ending the same way and you don’t like the ending, you can change it. Worrying about the future doesn’t help the future. Life doesn’t happen to you, it happens to you. Stress As A Motivator Does stressing over a situation motivate you to work harder? In that case, stress can seem like a beneficial thing. If you weren’t stressing so much, you would sit around playing video games instead of working toward a goal that will allow the stress to be alleviated. Being chronically stressed can cause adrenal fatigue which can lead to chronic disease. Making decisions based on fear can lead to poor decisions. You Are Not Required To Worry Do you feel as though if you don’t worry, you’ll fail? Some people who are very afraid to fly feel this way. Through the entire flight, they concentrate on the plane not crashing. When it doesn’t, they’re convinced that it was their worry that kept that plane aloft. They believe worry makes things happen or can prevent things from happening. Worrying is a waste of time. It’s creating a future that does not exist. You’re making it up! This doesn’t mean you stumble blithely along through life with no plan. But there is a difference between anxiety and concern. Whenever Joan starts worrying about money, she says to herself, “A large sum of money from an unexpected source.” Because that is as likely to happen as any doomsday scenario she could come up with thro... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices