For my first 40 years I lived a life of "noble poverty". When I heard that term I had a visceral reaction in my heart and my gut. I felt deeply understood, experiencing relief having named a condition I had lived with since I was a child. It is "the belief that there is virtue in not having money and that good people do not have it". People with this mindset live by the phrase "it is better to be good and poor than rich and evil". Now I understand that this mindset is based on a false dichotomy that you can have one or the other, and not both. Read More

As a child, money was tight; often a stressful topic at our house. Money messages included being prudent, entrepreneurial and thrifty. I wore hand-me-down clothes, planted seeds in our victory garden and overheard as my parents argued over whose turn it was to pick up the food stamps. My father taught math at a local high school and then took to the streets as a Fuller Brush salesman in the evenings. To bring in additional income, my mom corrected high school English papers and my father managed apartments to reduce our rent. I learned about the importance of saving money, of looking for opportunities, and of working hard. Read More

It’s Monday morning, the beginning of a new week. The day starts with greeting the sunrise from our garden that faces to the East. A few minutes of taking in the energy that provides us so many benefits every day, and then some meditation, establishes the foundation for all else. After a stroll in the garden it is time to enter into the technological universe with a quick review of Bloomberg.com and WSJ.com. What is happening on the global stage and in the financial markets? How are the markets doing and how might global factors and the events of the day impact the people that I work with? Read More

It began with a magic trick. When I was young a friend of my father's would pull a quarter out from behind my ear, and then make it disappear again. This became an apt metaphor for my relationship with money: one moment there and the next moment gone, feeding two powerful feelings about money: insecurity and lots of fear about never getting it back. My next memory of money was of being gifted with Kennedy silver half dollars on my birthdays (one for every year). Not realizing their worth, I spent most of them, but when I moved some years ago I found a stash of them in a small black bag. Read More