The Path to Happiness and Wealth

By Steve Rhode

I was awarded the Washington Post personal finance book of the month award for this book. It is a holistic look at the secrets to overcome debt and find a balance with money in your life. It’s a good book for people to read that might be having issues with shopping issues, compulsive spending, overspending, hidden debt, etc.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Rhode
• Release date: Apr 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452348629

Steve Rhode

Steve Rhode is a consumer debt expert who has assisted people since 1994 to find good solutions to bad debt problems.If you or someone you know needs some free help, advice or assistance, tell them to visit http://GetOutOfDebt.org and ask Steve for help.

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the path to happiness and wealth

How To Enjoy Money And Life At The Same Time

by

Steve Rhode

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Steve Rhode on Smashwords

http://GetOutOfDebt.org

The Path to Happiness and Wealth

How to Enjoy Money and Life at the Same Time

Copyright © 2002 by Steve Rhode

The Path to Happiness and Wealth First Edition By Steve Rhode

© 2002 Steve Rhode.

This book is intended to provide accurate information to educate you. This book is not intended to be a substitute for legal, investment, or financial planning advice. If you need legal or financial planning advice, you should consult with a lawyer, investment advisor, financial planner, or other professional in your state.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the authors’ work.

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The Path to Happiness and Wealth

How to Enjoy Money and Life at the Same Time

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DEDICATION

To Pam and Mandy,

Mom and Dad.

If I had to distill my life

with you down to three words,

they would be

"love and thank you."

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 –

I Got Hit in the Head With a Baseball and I Saw it Coming

Chapter 2 –

What Your Money is Trying to Tell You

Chapter 3 –

Take a Lap on the Gerbil Wheel of Debt

Chapter 4 –

Why Money Doesn’t Make You Happy

Chapter 5 –

If You Had a Million Rats, Would You be Successful?

Chapter 6 –

The 10 Attributes of Internal Prosperity

Chapter 7 –

The Attributes of Internal Prosperity in Action

Chapter 8 –

Your Money is Your Friend

Conclusion –

Listen to Your Heart

Acknowledgments

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Chapter One

I Got Hit in the Head With a Baseball and I Saw it Coming

In 1990, my wife and I filed bankruptcy. We kept the secret for almost 10 years and never talked about it publicly. I felt like a failure. It was painful and embarrassing and, though there were many factors that lead up to that event, it still causes a deep internal ache to talk about it. But we found, as you will, that keeping the secret was worse than being honest about what happened.

The first outsider I ever told about my bankruptcy was Mike Kidwell. I met Mike a couple of years after filing, when we both worked at IBM. I feel truly blessed that we met and were able to share our dreams and goals with each other. Our common dream to help people overcome the pain of money troubles has developed a strong bond between us. One day while we were at work, I felt I had to share my secret with Mike. I told him I needed to tell him something and asked him to follow me.

We went through three levels of security doors, going deeper into the heart of the building until we were finally in the mainframe room. There were a couple of glass walls through which people could see us talking, but no one could hear us because the noise in the room drowned out our conversation. I’m sure, as they saw us standing there, it seemed like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as HAL, the computer, watches the guys trying to have a private conversation in the pod. I was even worried that someone might be able to read my lips. I know it sounds ridiculous now.

I nervously told Mike my secret and it didn’t faze him a bit. What a guy. Years later, I told others. I just told you and I didn’t even need to. Since it’s no longer a matter of public record, you never would have known about my greatest financial failure. It is also the source of my inner strength. From that pain and financial devastation I was able to go on to help others. God gave me a doctorate in financial defeat. And as strange as it may sound today, I’m grateful for the blessing. God, if you are listening right now, I learned that lesson and don’t need a refresher.

Once I stopped worrying about how others might judge me, it gave me a freedom in life to stop hiding behind what might be and live in the now. It got tiring carrying around all that baggage. Once my wife and I atoned for our financial sins, it gave us even more comfort and freedom than we’d ever had. It was a huge milestone on the way to internal prosperity.

That is how my greatest failure became my greatest gift. I found that about 1.5 million people also face bankruptcy every year. Many face uncertainty and stress over financial problems. I was able to pull myself up by my bootstraps and search for a better way to deal with financial troubles so I don’t end up making the same mistakes twice. I resolved to help others by sharing what I learned. Now you don’t have to hit a brick wall without an air bag, like I did.

Even now, after a period of prolonged economic prosperity, our country is packed with people who lack confidence, feel lonely and unhappy, and are trying to have more and more stuff because they think the stuff will make them confident, secure and loved. The prevailing core belief appears to be that material wealth is the key to happiness. Ironically, people who believe that will probably never be able to achieve their dream of being wealthy because they are constantly feeding the emptiness they feel inside with money. They use money as a drug. As one client told me, Shopping is my heroin and Discover Card my needle. Their lives are painful and frustrating, so they pledge the money they have and the money they don’t have (credit) to the purchase of stuff they believe will dull the pain within. As they do this, the money they actually have slips through their fingers, gone forever.

So what is the secret to happiness if it isn’t money? Well, I’m not the Dalai Lama, I’m just a guy who’s been there. I’ve made mistakes and gained a lot of wisdom along the way. And, I’ve been fortunate to be able to use that wisdom to help a lot of people have more money, appreciate the money they have and lead better lives. One of the core reasons why their lives become more rewarding is because now they get it and a lot of the it is packed into this book.

I encourage you to abuse this book. Highlight passages that strike you. Underline sentences that speak directly to you and dog-ear pages you want to find again. Make it a true reference work for you as you discover your path to the rewarding life you deserve.

This book contains the skills necessary for you to begin to live a life of happiness, fulfillment, joy and wealth. It’s what you are looking for, and the basic tools are all right here.

Let’s Dig In

When you decide to dig into your money issues, what you might find is that you’ve been stuck and confused about what to do. Of course, what makes it more painful is the perception that somehow you were a victim of circumstances beyond your control and took no action to remedy the situation.

It’s hard for people to be honest with themselves when they are struggling with money issues, or at any other time, for that matter. People often feel an almost overwhelming urge to hunt for the perpetrator of their difficulty. There is so much blame being spread around in bad times that people sometimes forget to point at themselves. People don’t want their inner critic to begin shouting at them about how stupid they are, and on and on.

First, let’s take a healthy approach to the situation and put duct tape over your inner critic’s mouth. Your inner critic is that voice inside your head that is quick to tell you when you’ve screwed up. There is a helpful time for your inner critic to speak, and then there is now.

I was about 10 years old and visiting relatives in Vermont when I learned an important life lesson. It was one of those perfect summer days when the wind was just gently moving, the temperature was perfect, the sky was deep blue and not a bug was in sight. My uncle Ralph asked me if I wanted togo with him to see a local baseball team and, being the baseball fan that I was, I jumped at the chance.

I think it was a high school team playing that day. We arrived late and grabbed the last two seats in the wooden bleachers. I always have fond memories of wooden bleachers; the aluminum ones of today are just not as satisfying. I mean, not only are they cold on your tush on a winter night, but they are noisy as heck as people tramp across them. Anyway, we sat about two rows up from the bottom on the third base side. We grabbed the last couple of spots on the side of the bleachers farthest from home plate.

We had been there about 10 minutes, just long enough for me to see who was winning. This blond-headed guy got up to bat. I remember the pitch and swing in slow motion. The pitch was straight down the pipe, from my vantage point, and the swing was like you see on top of a