Getting Beyond Personal Finance Crisis Management

Personal finance crisis management (that’s actually what I was urging them to do by focusing on the problems at hand) is not satisfying in the long term. On the practical level, we can only bail so fast. Unless we figure out what’s punching the holes in our lifeboats we’ll eventually sink and drown. On the emotional level, we all need answers to such fundamental questions. We need to feel we’re standing on a firm foundation, a set of rules. We need to feel there’s some order to the universe. We need to feel we are in charge of our lives, or at least that we can be if we choose to seize the reins.

That’s why almost all the personal finance and career advice offered today is like a bad Chinese meal: Not only are you still hungry an hour after consuming it…but it also leaves a bad aftertaste. Honestly, I don’t mean to denigrate my fellow financial advisers and authors. But it’s just that they’re all still practicing crisis management; they’re trying to fix a system that’s beyond repair. I’m saying, throw out the system and get a new one.

It has taken me six long years to come up with the answers to those questions first asked of me by Mitch and Janet Peters, and subsequently asked by hundreds of other clients, friends, and family members; to come up with a new system for the new world. I now know why things aren’t getting better for those who are playing by the rules. I now know what’s causing all those fears and frustration. And more important, I finally know what they, and you, can do about it.

I’ve gotten beyond offering tips on crisis management and have, for the past two years, been preaching an entirely new, proactive approach to personal finance. An approach that promises greater physical, emotional, and psychological satisfaction than the outmoded rules of the past. It has worked for my clients. They’re back to feeling they can be masters, this time of their own universes. It can work for you too. It’s an approach I call Die Broke.