The Wealthy Martian: An Out-Of-This-World Guide to Financial Literacy for Parents, Teens and Other Earthlings. Master Your Basics, Master Your Mind, Master Your Drips.

By Karen L. Cumming

Imagine climbing into a spaceship and leaving Earth forever. That's exactly what Karen Cumming envisioned when she applied to become a citizen astronaut with the Mars One mission. To her amazement and delight, this broadcast journalist, writer and teacher made the cut again and again, finally becoming one of an elite group of fellow earthlings: the Mars 100.Fast forward a few years in space and time, and the teacher in Karen knows one thing for sure. This big blue marble we live on has a deep dark secret: millions of young earthlings are financially illiterate. Really.Sadly, the school system teaches the middle class how to work for their money instead of how to make their money work for them.Karen's mission – and yes, she has accepted it – is to teach financial literacy to earthlings young and old, and to change millions of lives in the process.Get ready to master your basics, master your mind, and master a specific investment strategy known as a DRIP or Dividend Reinvestment Plan. In no time, you'll find yourself boldly going where few middle-class humans have gone before.Are you concerned about your family's financial future?Are you concerned about your own?Happily, financial literacy isn't rocket science.If Karen can become a Wealthy Martian, so can you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Jan 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9780228897200

Karen L. Cumming

Karen Cumming is a broadcast journalist, author, freelance writer and teacher who loves to laugh, speak, write, travel and explore.This Wealthy Martian worked in radio and television news in Montreal, Edmonton, Toronto and Hamilton for twenty-five years. She produced features for the OBS network at the London 2012 Olympic Games and has written travel and human-interest stories for major-market newspapers and magazines including The Toronto Star, The Hamilton Spectator, Oxygen, More, Investment Executive and Costco Connection.Karen's career in education took her to a dozen secondary schools in Ontario, Canada. Thanks to her work on the front lines, she learned a lot about what we aren't teaching our children. That experience gave birth to this book—her second non-fiction title. Her first, The Indispensable Survival Guide to Ontario's Long-term Care System (created with her sister, Patricia Milne) debuted in 2019.Not surprisingly, Karen continues to dream about a life on Mars.

Book preview

Dedication

To my students, my family and friends, and to young people everywhere:

You inspired me to share what

I know about financial literacy.

To Allan and Grace and Anthony and Sophie:

I couldn’t have done this without you.

And to middle-class earthlings of all ages:

You have the power to think and invest like wealthy people do.

Starting now.

Table of Contents

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE - MASTER YOUR BASICS

The Wealthy Martian Seven

Chapter 1. Live Beneath Your Means

Chapter 2. Pay Yourself First

Chapter 3. Write Down Your Goals

Chapter 4. Build Your Budget

Chapter 5. Get Off the Debt-Go-Round

Chapter 6. Buy InsuranceWhen You’re Young

Chapter 7. Write a Will, Eh?

PART TWO - MASTER YOUR MIND

Create a New Relationship with Money

Chapter 8. Time and Freedom

Chapter 9. Flip Your Thinking

Chapter 10. I’m Worthy

Chapter 11. Visualize It

Chapter 12. Feel the Joy

Chapter 13. Hop on the Gratitude Rocket

Chapter 14. Thank Your Money

Chapter 15. Banks Don’t Care About Us

Chapter 16. Dividends vs. Interest: What’s the Difference?

PART THREE - MASTER YOUR DRIPs

Explore a Brave New World

Chapter 17. What the Heck Is a DRIP?

Chapter 18. Crunch the Numbers

Chapter 19. What the Heck Is a Dividend Aristocrat List?

Chapter 20. The DRIP Top Ten List

Chapter 21. Acquire Your Starter Share

Chapter 22. The Final Countdown: DRIP/SPP Pre-Flight Test

AND FINALLY…

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Appendix

Reading List

About The Author

Speaking EngagementContact Information

Testimonials

Preface

Ready to Launch?

Houston, we have a problem."

Tom Hanks as Commander Jim Lovell

Apollo 13

I’ve been a space geek for as long as I can remember.

Stories about astronauts risking their lives to explore the outer reaches of the galaxy are … well … thrilling to me.

When I was a kid, which I admit was a long time ago, I loved to watch the space-themed TV shows that were so popular in the 1960s. Lost In Space, The Jetsons, My Favorite Martian and Star Trek captured my imagination.

Pop culture loved space, and so did I.

At the age of four or five, I’d stretch out on the carpet in front of the RCA television set in my family’s living room, prop myself up on my elbows and soak it all in. I loved the theme songs, I loved the characters, I loved the dialogue.

Danger, Will Robinson!

Jane! Judy! Elroy!

Aye, aye, Captain Kirk!

Just like the crew of the starship Enterprise, I wanted to live long and prosper.

Fast forward a few years to July 20, 1969, and along came Apollo 11. American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to walk on the moon. Millions of families around the world sat mesmerized in front of their TV sets just like mine did. We held our breath as the crackly audio filtered through the TV console speakers:

That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind!

It was epic. Suddenly, anything seemed possible.

That iconic photo of the moon walk was splashed across the front page of newspapers around the world. I kept my copies of The Hamilton Spectator and The Toronto Star from that day for decades.

Fast forward again almost twenty years, to January 28, 1986. I was a young reporter at radio station CHOM/CKGM in Montreal. My brick of a cell phone rang just before noon and I was hurriedly assigned to a story that no one imagined could be true. The space shuttle Challenger had exploded in the sky seventy-three seconds after launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The experience of covering that story and interviewing people on the street for their reactions burned itself into my DNA.

My fascination with space was here to stay.

Pop culture’s fascination with space was here to stay too. Throughout the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties and two-thousands, Hollywood churned out a laundry list of classic films set in space, many of which were hugely successful at the box office. 2001: A Space Odyssey grossed USD$146 million in 1968. Star Trek: The Motion Picture checked in at USD$139 million. Alien took in close to USD$185 million, while Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Apollo 13 rocketed past USD$300 million. The Martian grossed more than USD$600 million. Amazingly, E.T., Star Wars, Gravity and Interstellar raked in more than USD$700 million. And the list goes on.

Little did I know that by 2013, the unbelievable would happen to me, not on a movie screen but in real life.

I was offered a shot at conquering space.

Me?

Yes, me.

Who could have imagined it?

Well … me.

I’d spent my whole life imagining it. I was Penny Robinson wearing silver go-go boots, exploring new galaxies and new dimensions of space and time on Lost in Space. I was Judy Jetson playing with my space dog Astro in 2062 on The Jetsons. I was Lieutenant Uhura, chief communications officer on the starship Enterprise. I visualized myself as these characters and was already living their lives in my imagination.

My shot at a life in space came thanks to a little something called the Mars One Mission. Ultimately, I became one of a select crew of fellow adventurers known as The Mars 100. You may have heard of us. We are one hundred people from around the world who made it to the final round of astronaut selection in a legitimate mission to colonize the red planet with a company called Mars One.

Really. Google us.

It all started one night as I sat on my living room couch surfing the internet. A headline on CNN.com caught my eye: Want to live on Mars? Apply now!

Dutch businessman Bas Lansdorp, CEO of the mission, wanted to hire citizen astronauts for what many saw as a crazy attempt to create a new society on Mars. If you had what it took, Lansdorp wanted to hear from you. Oh, and by the way, it was a one-way ticket.

Gulp.

Bas had dreamt of taking humankind to Mars as a child. Years later, he and his business partner Arno Wielders (a payload specialist with the European Space Agency) engineered a plan that would send twenty-four brave souls from Earth to the red planet. The team would be divided into six crews of four. Every two years, when the orbital window between Earth and Mars would allow, one crew would make the seven-month journey. At the end of twelve years, all twenty-four citizen astronauts would be on Martian soil.

The beauty of it was you didn’t have to be a scientist, astrophysicist or PhD candidate to qualify. You just had to be yourself and bring something unique to the table—something that the mission required.

I was a broadcast journalist, a writer and a teacher. It made sense that Mars One would need someone to document the mission and to teach earthlings about space from space. Canadian Colonel Chris Hadfield had done exactly that as commander of the International Space Station (ISS) in 2013. I wanted to do it too.

So I made a list of the pros and cons. I thought long and hard, took a deep breath and then clicked Apply. For the record, I did not tell my mother (that’s material for another book entirely).

To make a long story short, the mission lasted for nine wild and wonderful years before finally coming to a close in the fall of 2021. Mars One needed more investors to take the astronaut selection process to its conclusion. Had the final round gone ahead as planned, The Mars 100 would have spent two weeks living in a simulated Martian colony somewhere on Earth for observation by psychologist Dr. Norbert Kraft. Dr. Kraft would then have narrowed us down to the final core group of twenty-four. It wasn’t necessarily the most intelligent among us who would make the cut; those who could best work together as a team would get the golden ticket.

I got word that the mission had wound to a close via email on October 11. It was two days before William Shatner went into space with Amazon chief Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin. The feeling was profoundly bittersweet. On one hand, I was truly thankful for the chance to have been part of such a unique adventure. The opportunities it had given me to write and to speak to students about space exploration and the idea of living one’s dream were priceless.

On the other hand, I felt crushed. For close to a decade, I had believed with all my heart that the mission was going to happen. In the blink of an eye, I was no longer an aspiring Martian; I was an earthling who was unpacking her suitcase and staying put. Instead of living in a space colony forevermore, I would now spend the final third of my life right here on planet Earth.

Houston, we have a problem

But in a moment of deep reflection, I realized this was happening for a reason. There was something else I was supposed to do right here on terra firma.

My job here wasn’t finished.

That’s when it hit me. The prospect of saying goodbye to everyone and everything I’d ever known and loved had given me an extraordinary gift. It forced me to truly pay attention to the planet I was so ready to leave behind.

I started noticing—really noticing—the fabulous, positive things about Earth. I saw it all through new eyes, as if for the first time. The trees, the flowers, the lakes, the oceans, the clouds, the stars, the animals, the insects and the people all took on an angelic glow. They were more beautiful than I’d ever realized. They seemed … well … miraculous.