Do You Have Leaky Wallet Syndrome?

Many wealth gurus tell you to put living examples of your goals around so that they can be seen each day to visually reinforce your dreams.

For example, you can put pictures of your dream house on:

• - your screensaver
• - a whiteboard
• - the fridge door

An additional way to reinforce your goals is to carry a "feeling" of wealth around with you. For a while I used to carry around $500 in folding notes in my wallet. The idea is to emulate what wealthy people might carry as emergency cash and make me more confident about handling larger sums.

Take a look at the picture of my wallet, and you'll see it's pretty much empty of cash. Here's the reasons...

1. I'm a naturally cautious guy, and I was worried about leaving my wallet around where someone could empty its contents.
   
   
2. Ditto for being robbed. For many years I used to carry around Fijian banknotes which looked very similar to ours. My idea was if I was being accosted, my attackers wouldn't worry about examining the notes. After five years of never being attacked, that idea died naturally :-)
   
   
3. The $500 is wasted money because it's never in circulation. Like all reserves, it's best to have it as a form of credit. I'll spend a little more time on that in later posts.

But the most important reason for not carrying cash was Leaky Wallet Syndrome.

That's my term for the money being too available.

The temptation is to use cash... but you should really be using your credit card and getting air points and any other form of spending reward.

For a year or two I used to make my cash available to my wife. If she needed money, she could take whatever she needed from the wallet. Bad idea. Because she's not as frugal or tightfisted as me, I was always topping up the amounts frequently.

So the money leaks out never to be seen again, or recorded - which is the second-worst thing. Because if you don't record your spending, you don't know where it goes, and you won't be able to claim back expenses. With credit card or Eftpos statements, it's all listed there for you.

What's this got to do with lotto? The same applies. If your money is too readily accessible, it's going to leak out everywhere. Here's my suggestion...

1. When you first win, put everything except 10% into a bank account which can only be jointly accessed by yourself and your accountant.

2. After six months, you will have decided how to spend it. Only then withdraw the amount as you need it for investment or light spending.

So if you have Leaky Wallet Syndrome, don't give up You can still "act rich" to reinforce and stimulate your goals. I'll reveal all in the next post.

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