I read an interesting article on CTV News last night! The lady was talking about the attitudes of the wealthy and was impressed that most wealthy people she interviewed, discussed wealth outside the terms of money. Whenever money did come up, a list of generally accepted mindsets or attitudes began to develop and she shared them in her article here:
http://www.ctvnews.ca/5things/pattie-lovett-reid-engage-in-these-6-habits-of-the-wealthy-1.3374225
When I read this list, I was suddenly amazed at how my own family often accuses me of having a poverty mindset! I had to add my own thoughts to the author’s 6 main points in the article above. Before writing these out however, I showed my daughter this list and asked her how many of them are present in our home. She responded with “most if not all of them”, although current finances prevent us from enacting one of the sub-points in this list. It hasn’t however, stopped us from trying in the past, nor will it stop us from trying in the future. Here are my own thoughts. Anyone who has purchased my course “The Poor Man’s Budget: a Five Week Course – Learning to live within your means” (paid link) will recognize some of these points.
Change your money mindset: Have a positive attitude, increase your knowledge base, have goals and get disciplined ~ This begins by being thankful for what you have and following that Biblical concept that if you have two of something, give to him who has none. It can be tempting to hoard when you are financially struggling, living below the poverty line, or desperately battling debt. But if you honestly end up with more of something than you realistically know you need (not want), giving it away to someone else in need also contributes to a more positive attitude.
Sweep away your financial dustballs or myths:
a) Self worth equals net worth (Clearly it doesn’t but some might think it does) ~ I run into many people who believe this lie. Your self-worth is not found in things, nor in others around you. Your self-worth is found in the One Who made you! Your self-worth is found in Jesus Christ. Believe what He says about you in His Word and lack or plenty won’t affect your view of yourself. Secondarily, look after yourself no matter how much or little you have. You can always use water from a public fountain to wash up in the morning if you live on the streets. You can brush your hair and straighten your clothes. Walk with purpose rather than ambling aimlessly. Shake hands firmly and meet people eye to eye when greeting them. Don’t let life’s problems define who you are. Everyone, rich and poor have issues they battle with. Hold your head up and don’t let your particular issues drag you into the dirt.
b) A little debt never hurt anyone (Yes it will) ~ Financial advisors will tell you on one hand that it isn’t wise to get into debt. They will turn right around in the very next sentence and tell you to get a credit card so you can build up a positive credit rating. They will then go into detail about how to manage that credit card so that you ideally never slip into debt. Human nature, being what it is, will invariable see the credit limit, see an emergency, what Christmas approach, and decide to spend just a little bit more than they can pay off at the end of the month. They will justify it by saying now they have a debt load against which to build that credit rating, because creditors will see the monthly efforts. Now this is true to a point, but it will come back to bite you eventually. Yes, unfortunately the modern financial world won’t sell you a car or house if you don’t have positive credit ratings, but a little debt has and will continue to hurt people.
c) I need at least $1 million to retire (No, you don’t) ~ What you need is to assess the lifestyle you want when you retire, what would it cost now and what is the current inflation rate? Based on that inflation rate, how much will you need to have in savings when you retire to lead that kind of lifestyle month by month?
d) I need to be a math major (Also, not true) ~ No, the above calculations are basic math. Addition and multiplication and maybe some division. If you graduated grade 6, you have what it takes to figure out the previous answer.
e) I don’t have enough money to start investing (How about $25 a month?) ~ Most people can afford at least $25/mo. Those living on fixed incomes may not be able to however, nor those living below the poverty line, but whenever possible, it is advisable to set aside even $5 a month if you can manage it. What I find in our household is that I can get up to $3 or $400 saved up, then an emergency comes along or income takes a dive and I need the funds to buy gas and groceries. I am looking forward to the day when income is steady and I can get that savings account above that particular threshold.
f) It’s too late for me to start building a nest egg (No it isn’t, and retirement could last a third of your life) ~ It’s true, you can start saving at any age, the earlier the better, but any time is a good time as long as it is sooner to your present than later.
g) Personal finance is all about investing (It is so much more encompassing: debt management, insurance, retirement planning and more) ~ The biggest point in personal finance, is budgeting based on what you are regularly earning at the time. Then learning to stick to that budget. Failure to get this step down will make any other financial management task more difficult.
h) I can do it alone (Maybe, but start by asking for help) ~ If you understand how to set money aside and not touch it, if you know about TFSA’s or RRSP’s already, sure, go it alone, but be almost religious about the plan you put into action. Asking for help often involves paying an advisor for their time or using their ongoing services from which they get paid a commission. If you can’t afford to pay someone for help, start small and work from there.
Eliminate the spending habit: Live below your means and ditch your bad debts ~ Hear, hear!!! This is the second worst problem I am seeing among those who claim to be struggling in their finances. They still visit the corner store regularly. They still buy cookies and candy bars regularly and sugary or other unhealthy food choices when grocery shopping. They still think they can engage in bad habits that cost them anywhere from $200/mo to $500 or more and they wonder where their money is going! Newsflash! You don’t need that jacket on sale when you have two others at home already. You don’t need sugary drinks or foods when because you are struggling, you need healthier food options instead. You don’t need to waste gas with extra-curricular activities when you can’t afford the gas to begin with. Start walking more. Cancel the Cable TV subscription and watch all your shows online. If this step isn’t mastered, the previous ones will all be derailed by some justification to spend!
Create a savings habit: Pay yourself first ~ See the previous comments about saving and spending.
Embrace the investing and compound habit: Learn more to earn more and compound your earnings ~ This may be where you want to ask for help, but in a standard savings account, if you leave your money there, the interest accrued will compound based on what stays in the account, previous interest and all. This can work in your favour.
Choose a destination: Get real and set goals ~ Revisit this entire list, master the other points and when you get to this one, write down those goals. In a quick-fix, instant-access society, long-term gratification seems like punishment. But if you can get over the need to spend and start actively saving toward your goals, you will discover the pride and personal joy in having achieved those goals on your own! Start with small goals that you can reach if you are disciplined in a month. Say perhaps you can get $25 put aside into savings. Reward yourself with a hot bath that night. Say perhaps you went for three months putting that money aside? Take $5 and go buy a booster juice smoothie (remember the poor spending point above). Say perhaps you managed to maintain your new saving regimen for an entire year, take $20 and go have pizza! These examples are merely for savings goals, but you might have other goals, like paying for a college course, replacing a dieing vehicle, maybe even owning your own home and saving up for a down-payment. Once you realize you can meet your smaller goals, these larger ones will become easier to achieve and you’ll have the necessary patience to see them through.
As discussed in 
Your toolkit MUST include:
One of the rules of thumb I learned very early on my career as a computer repair technician, is that about:blank in a browser’s address bar can spell trouble, particularly for Internet Explorer. About:blank has been taken advantage of by numerous drive-by installation threats dropping backdoor trojans, worms, rootkits and other nasties onto people’s computers. This is one reason for the sharp eye paying attention to everything going on with laser focus ignoring the ads! In my experience, allowing your antivirus scanner to scan links wreaks havoc with the various captcha codes you need to solve, particularly those that tell you to click images until there are no more. Each image sent to you in that grid is a link that has to be scanned by your AV link scanner. It’s better to develop a sharp eye for trouble than to bog down your computer with so many link scans, especially if you use my method for earning satoshi via faucets.
Since roughly around mid-February, I stepped away from Facebook to focus on an experiment. I didn’t know where this was going to take me, but with work being as difficult has it’s been for a couple years now, it didn’t hurt to try to put some hours into something that may or may not pay off in the future. My books sell in a trickle, no mugs or t-shirts have sold yet although I have a large list to create still, causing my tech support services to still carry the day even though it too tends to be sporadic.
Special computers and software solve these puzzles and create the hashes, known as blocks, in a fairly visible blockchain known as Bitcoin. I haven’t heard much talk about this in my own circles of influence, but there is a sizeable and growing online community based around this virtual currency. This currency even has an exchange rate to bring it into real-world terms and usage. That exchange rate goes up and down based on the value of a single bitcoin as it is traded throughout the day. During these past two months, the bitcoin value went from over $1200 USD to $934 USD to back up around $1184 USD earlier this month. How do I know this? My experiment!
The image to the left is the local Staples flyer
for Black Friday weekend. The image to the right is my comparison drawn between Staples and 
They come in all shapes and sizes. Some come with attitude, some come placidly. But ALL are at the mercy of critters, birds, and now US! Yes, the wild adventures continue as we realize summer is turning to fall in our neck of the woods, and we have to consider how we’ll continue trying to save money as plants wind down for the year.
After posting that meme, I turned on the oven the next day to actually dry them, then went to get my daughter from work. Upon entering the house, she promptly declared the place smelled like apple pie! I had neither seasoned, nor made apple pie, only dried the bearberries in the oven! So not only do these little things look, taste, bruise, and core like miniature apples, they also smell like them!
I sit here tonight drinking a test cup of nettle, dandelion, chokecherry leaves, semi-crushed dried berries and stems, and homegrown mint leaves and stems. I mixed one part dandelion to two parts of everything else more or less, and one part mint roughly. The resulting tea had a very grassy taste with a decidedly nettle scent, but with a bit of honey, tastes very mellow. Not bad as it grows on you. That mix of tea is now in a little labelled container up in the tea cupboard. There’s enough chokecherry crushed to make tea for a long time this winter! Nettle has a decent amount in the cupboard too, but I only had enough dandelion root for the blend I put together this evening.
The first bottle of infused shampoo is in the shower now as well, along with infused facial scrub and leave-in conditioner. We also made more of the chokecherry vinegar as well, meaning I need to pay back the VISA for yet more buckets of salad mix and salad dressing. I also need to pay back the VISA for a second bottle of shampoo as shortly, all of us will be using the same shampoo instead of different bottles. I’m looking forward to updating that spreadsheet needless to say!
Facial cleanser, shampoo, conditioner, tooth paste, window cleaner, bathroom cleaner, tea, salad dressing, salad greens. . . all a mix of foraging, vinegar, baking soda, and more liquid glycerin soap than I thought I’d end up making. . . eucalyptus oil thrown in here and there for good measure. . . eventually I’ll be able to clean both the house and myself using far fewer chemicals! The wild salads have more nutrition in them than what we were doing before as well. Add to that saving money on those aspects of grocery shopping, and it’s a win, win, win situation.
We did eventually get the nettle, bringing home a full grocery bag’s worth of leaves and stalks. Taking care to pick them clean of the stalks resulted in filling a salad spinner! The wet leaves didn’t take up much room, but as the leaves were spun dry, they fluffed out to fill the entire thing! I’m looking forward to making some infusions with the nettle, one of which I will try drinking as a way of assisting my adrenal health, hair, etc. We’ll see how it goes. I don’t know if we picked enough for the full experiment, or if it will be “as supplies allow”, but we’ll see.
Backing up to the previous night, I took a jar of old glycerin soaps my kids had made at camp as kids, chopped them up, and made liquid hand soap out of them. The recipe called for 6 cups of water to every half cup of chopped soap. I ended up with a full cup, resulting in 12 cups of water in a soup pot. The soaps had been coloured various shades of blue, green, yellow, clear, red, etc, so as they melted, the water began to take on an aqua-marine colour. Once everything had melted and the pot had come to a simmering boil, I was to remove the pot from the heat and allow it to sit for up to twelve hours, 24 if necessary, or longer if the soap needed more time to set.
The saddlebags my daughter was working on were fitted to her horse yesterday as well, and they do indeed fit. The mare also didn’t seem phased whenever Ashley demonstrated going into the bags to fetch or return full water bottles. This means that the two can now go trail riding and bring home food when they’re done.
I don’t need all three however, so if you want one, send me $30 via paypal and I’ll ship it off to you. Only two of you can take advantage of this deal. Most of that $30 will go into Canadian shipping costs, as these are heavy little units! If shipping ended up being more than $25, I’ll ask you to cover the rest via paypal again ASAP. $5 each is what I paid for them at the thrift store, although they look like they could sit in a museum case somewhere! The middle grinder is not for sale! That one is mine!
Speaking of which, we have leaves drying for use in a shampoo and for use in a water infusion that I’ll use when making the leave-in conditioner as well. Dried herbs are also useful in making an infused vinegar hair rinse.
I have an oil infusion gently boiling on the stove. The result will go into a facial cleanser/scrub. A pot of liquid glycerin soap is cooling on a back burner on the stove as well. It will be used in little amounts for shampoos, anti-bacterial hand soaps, and similar products.
Lifestyle changes are rarely free of charge. We had to buy garden gloves, because to this point we had never owned any other than those my daughter took to work all the time. The garden gloves are to allow us to pick stinging nettle for use in our hygiene products. Apparently you can eat nettle, but when I was out with my daughter gathering the other night, this is how I came home!
At the top, we found scrub everywhere and very little of the items we’d come to find. Eventually, we spotted a small burdock specimen and decided to pull out our plastic gardening spade to see if we could get at the root. When documentation you read says it looks carrot-like, they aren’t kidding! When they say the root could go down 2 to 3 feet, they aren’t kidding! What many sources fail to say however, is that the first almost foot’s worth is quite fat! My daughter dug down just below this tuber then used our tiny rose sheers to snip her way through the inch-thick root (the part the Japanese harvest to sell and cook) to remove the tuber. This took a bit of time when we realized we should head back before they close the parking lot gate where we left the van.
We got back down to our marker when Ashley discovered a whole stand of chokecherry! She began picking a number of sprigs as quickly as she could. As we speed-walked back to the van, I told her that anything she spotted ahead that she could grab before I got there, would go in the bag. So off she went! You might wonder why this article was started as if beginning a quest in a video game. Ashley kept remarking as we speedwalked back to the van, that she felt as if she was doing in real life what her characters did in her MMO’s (short for MMPORG or Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Game). 
Apparently in her games, characters can be given quests where they need to gather materials before they can make things. Some games call these recipes, others call them schematics, etc. The character has to run around (and they literally run around, not walk) and when the player sees an item they need, they use in-game commands to tell the character to pick up the item. For some games, you select the item, for others, you choose a tool, then click on the item, for others, you merely come into range and the character picks up the item. So there was my daughter, running ahead of me, picking up what she could along the path, snapping up this and that on our list. Before we knew it, we saw the parking lot up ahead! Somehow, we made the trek back to the van in less than 25 minutes!
We had a good handful of narrow-leaf plantain, dandelion leaves and a couple roots, chokecherry, a burdock root, a couple burdock leaves and a couple small burdock heads. Ashley had grabbed a few clover heads along the way as well. We didn’t spot any chickweed or purslane, and cattails don’t grow along that trail either it seems. So we drove home with what we had.
Upon arrival at home, it was time to clean the greens, clean the roots, and learn what to do with the chokecherries. They literally look like tiny cherries WITH pits! I did some research and bookmarked a couple sites that shared recipes for chokecherry juice, jams, jellies, bread, muffins, etc. I need to get my hands on a hand mill of some type because dried chokecherry flour can be added to baking! I learned that you don’t eat this berry raw due to cayonogenic properties. You need to sun-dry or boil them to kill these properties. Our first foray into chokecherry processing then, became an infused vinegar salad dressing. The chokecherries ended up boiled twice as a result, first to mash them, second to make the salad dressing as the vinegar needed boiling. The leaves and bark make a nice tea according to some sources, so we kept the leaves and twigs to dry for that purpose.