“Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.” &mdash Will Smith

No, this isn’t a rave about how awesome money is. (Did I fool you with the title?) This is where I spell out my rules about money and its role in my life.

Everything needs to have its place in your life properly defined. We label the people we know — friend, acquaintance, best friend, significant other, spouse, brother, parent, boss, coworker — and allot appropriate importance and privilege to each according to their role. And we do the same for our car, television, power tools, pets, etc. So why do so few people define these limits for their money?

I might loan my car to my best friend, but I wouldn’t loan it to my neighbor. I would never drive a BMW on a construction site for fear of getting nails in the tires. I might miss the Super Bowl if my father was dying in the hospital, but not for much else. Isn’t it time to define similar limits to how I use my funds? And you too?

Rule #1: Don’t create debt
Borrowing money, whether it’s an auto loan or a credit card purchase, leashes me and my freedom to someone else. The more I owe, the less freedom I have to change jobs, take a vacation, or move somewhere new.

Rule #2: Buy quality
A cheap, flat-pack, pressed cardboard bookshelf will be wobbly before long and it will need to be replaced in a year or two, whereas a solid wood bookshelf might last the rest of my life, and will be attractive too. Cheap clothes with shrink, and won’t fit right, whereas nice clothes fit properly and last longer. The same goes for all purchases. Cheap things need to be replaced. And although they serve their purpose, they don’t make you happy, so you’ll end up wanting something better soon enough anyhow. Just get the good one right at the start.

Rule #3: Don’t buy crap
How much money does the average person simply throw away on trinkets and baubles and utter nonsense, only to create more clutter and chaos in their home? And absolutely no collections! I won’t be wasting my money on porcelain figurines, collector plates, or other nonsense that takes up space and adds stress without providing pleasure. And definitely no singing fish, no garden gnomes, no stuffed animals, no handheld electronic games, and no cute little frog-shaped glass figurines on the back of the toilet.

Rule #4: Loan as if it’s a gift
Making loans to other people is a good way to ruin your relationship with them. Yes, we always intend to pay back a loan, but when we ask for the loan we’re rarely thinking about how we’ll pay it back — the focus is on getting it in the first place. Loans often drag on for a long time, and many never get repaid. When making a loan, always silently consider it a gift. Then it will be a pleasant surprise when it is paid back.

Rule #5: Only two credit cards
I only need two credit cards: one department store card that qualifies me for discounts and provides free gift wrapping services, and one that gives me free airline miles for all my other purchases. These cards need to be paid in full at the end of every month.

Rule #6: Online account management
I will only use financial services that provide online access. The internet provides instant access to account information and the ability to make fast (often immediate) payments. At this point, any bank, creditor, or investment service that does not provide online service is either too disorganized, or else has something to hide.

Rule #7: Don’t fall for the upsell
Pay for the item you want, don’t get sucked into the accessories. I never buy the extended warranty plans. I buy the cell phone, but I skip the personalized case and goofy belt clip. I’ll buy the shoes, but I don’t need the protective leather spray. I’ll buy the camera, but I don’t want your lens wipes.

Rule #8: Invest in the future
Nobody else is going to take care of my future, so I have to do it myself. That means savings, investments, retirement plans, and anything else I can do to create a more secure future for myself.

Rule #9: Time is money
Wasting time is wasting money. If I can save $60 by fixing my clogged drain myself, but it will eat up most of my day off, it’s better to pay a professional so that I can spend my day doing what I had planned to do. This is especially true when the activity would require me to miss work. If it costs extra to have it done on the weekend, but won’t cost me a day’s pay, it’s worth the extra cost.

Rule #10: People aren’t impressed by money
People should be impressed by my personality, not my extravagance. Throwing money around is only a cover for insecurity. I will not overspend on Christmas, birthday, anniversary, or Valentine’s Day gifts. I will not buy things for show. And absolutely no bling! Money buys things, not people.

So there you have it: ten rules to define the role of money in my life. What about you? What are your thoughts? What boundaries have you set for money in your own life? Leave some comments and let me know.

“I believe that the definition of definition is reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. Completely.” — Henry Rollins

Everyone loves the rebel — guys want to be like him, girls want to be with him, authority figures want to change him. The rebel gets all the attention, and controls all the power. Let’s face it: rebels are cool. And it’s hard to find a cooler rebel than Cool Hand Luke, who is the latest subject of my ongoing blog series about how Hollywood helped to shape my life.

A natural born world-shaker
From beginning to end, there can be no doubt that Luke is a rebel. He bends to no authority but his own, and in doing so, he shakes things up. That’s what happens. When you go against the grain, when you walk against the crowd, when you don’t do what everyone else is doing, things get shaken up.

In this modern, overpopulated world, everyone works hard to “fit in”. People are sheep: they get their opinions from the same talking heads; they follow the trends, shop in the same stores, and wear the same clothes; they drink the same trendy beers and eat the same trendy foods.

When someone doesn’t fit in they stand out, and that’s what Luke did. That’s what Michael Jackson did, and Marilyn Manson, and Howard Stern. Copernicus, and Columbus, and Darwin went against the grain. The quickest and easiest (and often best) way to get noticed is to be different — to be a rebel.

Go to the mall some time in blue jeans and a sweat shirt, and walk in the same door as everyone else and ride up the escalator with everyone else, and see how many heads you turn. Then go back in some nice clothes, and walk in where people are walking out, and try going up on the down escalator, and see the difference. You don’t even have to do it, because you already know what will happen — everyone will be looking at you.

That’s how it was for Cool Hand Luke. Everyone in the chain gang lived vicariously through him. They all watched anxiously to see what he’d do next. They got their satisfaction from his willingness to do what they all wanted to but lacked the nerve. They fed off of him.

Sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand
Luke earns his nickname “Cool Hand” after he wins a poker game by keeping his cool while bluffing on a losing hand. Even when he knew he was beaten, he never accepted defeat. And more, his confidence was never shaken.

In another scene, Luke got into a fight with Dragline, the prison yard bully. He is clearly outmatched by Dragline, who is much bigger and stronger than him, and who is repeatedly knocks him to the ground, but he keeps getting up. Even after being warned to “stay down, you’re beat,” Luke replies, “you’re gonna hafta kill me.”

Even when he’s got nothing, Luke never gives up. (It reminds me of Captain Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru.) He never accepts defeat, and he never loses his cool. It’s that persistence that earns him the respect of everyone else in the prison.

A rebel without a cause
For all the admirable qualities we find in our protagonist, the funny thing is that Luke always loses. It seems clear that this is because he never had a goal. During his last big escape attempt, when asked how long he was planning it his response is “I never planned nothin’ a day in my life.”

Had he ever turned all that charm and all that perseverance toward accomplishing a specific goal, Luke might have been unstoppable. Imagine those same qualities applied toward training for the Olympics, or being an entrepreneur, or running for office. But without a goal, all that charm and persistence and rebellion only fueled his impulsive mischief.

Luke was an agitator. He landed in prison for cutting the heads off of parking meters. When asked why, his response was, “small town, not much to do in the evenin’.” Idle hands are the devil’s playthings, as they say. A man needs to have a purpose.

Life isn’t fair
When Luke’s mother died, the warden had him put in the box just to prevent him from trying to get to her funeral. After a torturous week of hard work, while everyone else got a day off to rest, he was forced to spend the entire time digging a hole and filling it in, just to dig it again, all without sleep or rest. And in the final scene, he dies unjustly.

Everything bad that happened to Luke was unfair. And that’s life: it isn’t fair. But Luke’s whims were his undoing. You have to pick your battles. There are times when there is nothing to be gained from being the rebel.

“It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.” — Henry Ford

While baseball bears the moniker of “America’s pass time”, basketball has always had its loyal fans, and NASCAR seems to resonate well with the toothless gitterdones, I have always held the NFL as truly being America’s sport.

Just think about the difference. New Yorkers and Bostonians make a lot of noise when the Yankees play the Red Sox (and somehow this phenomenon manages to suck in all manner of outside interest). There is no city in the world where you can’t find a Chicago Cubs hat. All of Hollywood’s elite compete for court-side seats at Lakers games. But for four months out of the year, the entire world stops on Sunday while we all tune in to see our favorite teams and players.

While big market baseball teams (read The Yankees) spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year in order to steal the talented players from everywhere else, and buy a championship, as they say, teams in the NFL have had to make teamwork and coaching matter under a tight salary cap.

While the average hockey team is predominantly Canadian and European, and while the average baseball team is predominantly Dominican and South American, you still find that most players in the NFL are American — black, white, hispanic, or asian, there is no racial bias, but there is a bias toward being American.

While Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds use steroids to rewrite the record books, and while the NBA’s definition of traveling keeps bending to allow superstars to take five steps and slam dunk without a whistle, the NFL works each year to tighten the penalties and to stop teams from cheating.

And that topic, cheating, is what really pisses me off about spygate. It was cheating. Hardcore, in-your-face, no nonsense, no excuses… it was cheating.

Worse, the team that did it just happens to be the team that everyone has been calling the latest dynasty. The pundits have all praised the Patriots for being the first team to figure out how to win consistently since the salary cap was imposed. Little did they know that they were praising a team for figuring out how to cheat.

League commissioner Roger Goodell handed down his (weak) punishment before he ever got his hands on the tapes. But worse still, he learned that Congress wanted to see the tapes and knowing this, he had them destroyed. Come on, folks… you’ve seen Sopranos, you know how this works. I sure miss Paul Tagliabue.

What a dumb move. Really. But I thank the powers that be for the tenacity of Senator Arlen Specter who, as ESPN.com points out, isn’t buying it:

Specter heard that explanation from Goodell on Wednesday. On Thursday, Specter said, “The word absurd and ridiculous keep coming to my mind, because he [Goodell] says it with a straight face.”

Specter said it was unsettling to learn that the tapes, as well as notes, turned over by the Patriots in September had been destroyed in Foxboro rather than in the league’s New York offices. Aiello said the documents and tapes were destroyed after they were reviewed by NFL officials Jeffrey Pash and Ray Anderson, and that the call to destroy the material came from Goodell, saying “There’s no further use for it, so he said get rid of it.”

Specter said the league’s suggestion that the material, particularly the notes dating to the 2002 season, was destroyed because it might have afforded a competitive advantage is unbelievable.

“Everything has changed,” he said. “Nobody could use those. They are scrap paper — except evidence.”

What we really need here is a whistle-blower — someone who was a member of the Patriots organization, and who knows the extent of the cheating and what advantage it provided, and who would come out and tell the world the truth in order to salvage the integrity of the sport. Unfortunately, that will never happen. Anybody who did that would never work in professional sports ever again, and that’s too much to lose for anyone who’s worked to get to this level.

I hope Senator Specter gets to the bottom of this and delivers a huge slap in the face to Roger Goodell and the NFL and to the Patriots organization for the shame they’ve brought upon the one team sport that I always felt was above the rest.

“Good times are when people make debts to pay in bad times” — Robert Quinlin

There’s a lot of disinformation and disagreement out there about whether or not we’re headed into recession. Make no mistake: we are.

It’s not a question of “is it or isn’t it”, but rather a question of “dear god, how bad is it going to be?” Take a look, for instance, at this article in Time magazine:

Consumer spending used to make up about 67% of all the economic activity in the U.S., but over the past few years, it’s ratcheted up to around 72%. “If we take the 5 percentage points out this year, it will be the mother of all U.S. recessions,” Roach says. But putting the adjustment off indefinitely isn’t a great idea either. “It’s just pushing the fundamental problem down the road,” says Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. “The problem with the U.S. is excessive consumption.”

And for bonus points, look back to Tuesday’s rant about consumerism on Valentine’s Day, and reconcile that thought in your head against the last sentence quoted above. Allow me to reiterate, with emphasis added: The problem with the U.S. is excessive consumption.

The government’s proposed “stimulus package”, only pisses me off. This is the brilliant idea whereby poor people will be receiving free money from the government, in hopes that it will spur them out to buy more goods. But wait a second… if the problem in the U.S. is excessive consumption, how does funding even more consumption help to solve the problem?

Those with any brain matter in their heads will use that money to pay back part of the debt they’ve tallied by over-spending, because once the disinformation ends and we all accept that it’s a recession, I promise you that those who carry debt will suffer the most.

I’d like to take a moment to talk about mind control. Mind control is the ultimate power; you can use it to influence others, to alter your own reality, and to make personal gains or profit. The possibilities are endless.

Now let’s be clear, I’m not talking about some ESP or other hocus pocus that you might see in a movie. This isn’t some Jedi mind trick, and it’s not hypnosis. It’s much simpler, much more down-to-earth, and yet much more powerful if you learn to use it.

In other words, I’m not talking about controlling other people’s minds, I’m talking about controlling your own. Frankly, yours is the only mind that you have the power to control anyway.

Why So Negative?
Considering all the facts and evidence may be the most logical course of action, and may lead to the most accurate and reasonable decisions, but it takes time. When a prehistoric human was faced with a new threat — for instance, a hungry lion — considering all the facts and evidence would have taken too long and he would have been eaten. Thus, our brains are equipped to take shortcuts. We have the power to assume. We developed the ability to make quick, loose judgment calls without considering all the evidence, because the ability to assume proved to be beneficial to survival.

We humans are biologically evolved to favor negativity. As a simple survival trait, natural selection favors pessimism because those who are too trusting or too nonchalant would not have survived, while those who were cautious or skeptical were likely to live to tell about it… and to reproduce.

So, to greatly oversimplify the complicated topic of evolutionary psychology, that explains why it is so easy to see the bad in a situation, or to assume the worst about something someone says. It’s built in to our DNA! We humans are natural skeptics. We are natural pessimists. Murphy’s Law is a product of evolution, and so is the “why me?” attitude.

Unlike our ancestors, however, we don’t face daily challenges to our survival. We’ve learned about man-eating tigers in school so we don’t have to guess at their motives… but moreover, the odds of encountering one in daily life are inordinately low!

There aren’t many threats to our survival lurking around the corner. Civilization has provided us with governments and laws and hospitals and health care. We’ve learned about germs and disease and all-in-all, modern civilization has made it pretty easy to survive. Yet we still have that evolved propensity for negativity, and now it’s working against us!

The Power of Positivity
Caution and skepticism work because our brains have evolved to use shortcuts, but those same shortcuts can be exploited to favor positivity and optimism. Instead of assuming the worst in a situation, you can make the conscious choice to assume the best. And doing so repeatedly will make it a habit.

I hear people all the time talking about fear of failure. They’re afraid to try something because they might not succeed. But failure when trying something new, like investing in stocks or starting your own business is a far different thing than the failure our ancestors would experience if they weren’t able to escape that hungry predator.

All the most successful people in history have understood this same concept: failure is not a bad thing. Instead of fearing failure, successful people welcome it. They see the positive, rather than the negative: they learn from failure, rather than sulking in it.

Perception is Reality
The power of our evolved ability to assume is that we are not consciously aware of the difference between an assumption and a fact. It truly is a shortcut, leading to the same place: belief. What you perceive becomes your reality.

If you believe that you are cursed, you will find the evidence of it everywhere you look. If you believe that people are out to get you, you will see yourself as the victim in every interaction you have. If you believe in Murphy’s Law, things really will go wrong at every turn.

But the opposite can be true, too. You can choose to believe that people are inherently good, and you will find that they will prove you right. You can choose to believe that there is no such thing as a lose-lose — that every choice has a positive outcome — and you will benefit from that attitude as you go through life.

Success is a choice. Popularity is a choice. Happiness is a choice. It’s all in your mind. No one else can make you unhappy if you choose to be happy. No one else can take away your joy. Only you make the choice.

The power of mind control is choosing how you will perceive the world, rather than defaulting to those negative assumptions.

“Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.” — John D. MacDonald