What You Need to Know About Money Management

Ham and Cheese

 

I’ve had a couple of people ask me recently about newcashview.com.  One person visited the website and left a comment asking about its purpose.  Is it an investment strategy?  Am I some kind of financial adviser?  The answer to both questions is no. 

 

Though, I do understand the nature of the questions.  They stem from a general lack of content on the website.  This is partly due to the fact that I’ve been working furiously on Money Basics (Pulitzer is pending), and the two courses that are now available on courses.newcashview.com (yay!!).  I’ve been focusing my attention on the book and courses rather than on ncv.com.  So, that is why the website is a little lean on content.  I wrote this post to get the blog train moving and to explain a little bit about the purpose of ncv.com.

 

A little background will be useful in helping to explain what I’m doing here.  I started out on my path as a bankruptcy attorney when I was fresh out of law school.  During my bankruptcy practice, and through personal experience, I began to see financial behaviors and patterns in clients and others.  That general observation led me to realize a couple of things about what you need to know about money management.

 

First, I came to the realization that there are two aspects of money management.  Most of us are familiar with the practical, technical aspect of money management.  This includes budgeting, income maximization, investment strategies, and general financial literacy. 

 

Next, is the less obvious aspect of money management.  This aspect includes understanding your relationship with, attitudes about, and feelings toward money.  Now, this second aspect is far more tricky because it’s internal and not something you can directly pin down with an account statement, paycheck stub, or by crunching numbers.  It’s something you have to work hard to understand about yourself using concepts and ideas that are not necessarily obvious.  For this reason, the second aspect of money management is easy to turn a blind eye to and ignore.  Most of us ignore it because we were never taught any differently, myself included.

 

The second realization for me was that there are plenty of resources available regarding the technical aspects of money management.  You can google the word budget and come up with a ton of information on how to set one up, how to automate investing, and etc.  The same is not true for the internal aspect of money management.  I found a vacuum existed when it came to credible information about how to address these internal issues in the context of money management. 

 

So, I decided my goal was to use my experience and knowledge to try to fill that void by joining these two aspects of personal finance into one philosophy.  I decided I would then try to teach it in an way that would be easy to understand, possibly while making jokes about girdles and sombreros. 

 

You may be saying “girdles and sombreros, that came out of nowhere!”  Well, the truth is that tough things are a lot easier to talk about through laughter instead of angst.  That’s something I learned while practicing law, so you’ll have to bear with me and tolerate my ridiculous sense of humor.  I’ll do anything I can to make this otherwise dry, boring topic more fun and entertaining.  So, get ready for some bad jokes!  A little ham and cheese, if you will.  In fact, you may even find some of them enjoyable.  Like all those crazy commercials with dogs driving Subarus.  I laugh and laugh at those commercials.  If you think they’re as funny as I do, then let me just say in advance… you’re welcome!

 

That is what ncv.com is about so, stay tuned for more great stuff!

 

Sincerely,

Joy Alford-Brand

Your Dollar Lama