Posted on by BWThomas

If we take no risks, do we leave no room for luck in our lives?

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

Luck and risk-taking go hand in hand. Thomas J. Stanley

How do luck and risk play out in our lives? We might not want to think luck more than good management or smarts has helped us get to where we are, but if we are honest, and things could be much worse than they are, luck probably played a part.

I listened to a podcast with Martin Housel, author of “The Psychology of Money” and “The Art of Spending Money.” He started out thinking he’d be lucky if he could sell 500 books. He says, “If you can’t repeat how well something went, then luck might have played a role.” He had to write his first book, “The Psychology of Money,” and it had to be a good book, but it sold millions, not hundreds, and he credits at least some of that to luck.

We might be lucky if things aren’t as bad as they could be, or much better than we imagined. We might be lucky if we have a better-than-average life instead of a less-than-average one.

There are many times I’ve felt lucky in my life, especially when things could have gone really wrong but didn’t. Some of life is up to us, but I’ve often thought of the song, “If I didn’t have bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.” Does what we expect have something to do with it? If we expect good things, then good things happen, or we expect bad things, and they happen?

The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks. Mark Zuckerberg

Sometimes we hear about people who never seem to have taken many risks in life. Can luck play out in our lives if we never take any risks? If we don’t take a risk on love and building a life with someone, how can we be lucky in love? If we don’t take a risk at going after more than we think is possible, how can luck play a part? If we don’t take a risk to make a friend, how can we be lucky in friendship? If we don’t take a risk in investing in something, are we making room for luck?

We might take it like a slap in the face if someone credits much of our success in life to pure luck, but what if believing in luck is part of being humble? If luck didn’t play a part, what did? Our own magnificence?

There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction. John F. Kennedy

Big risks will always be disregarded: small risks always blown out of proportion. Morgan Housel

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. T.S. Eliot

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Thank you for reading my books, and a special thank you to those who leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item, I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.

Posted on by BWThomas

Love makes the world go around.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

Love is a better master than duty. Albert Einstein

Valentine’s Day is coming, where couples feel pressure to be romantic, and singles feel pressure to be coupled. What does romance look like? We feel it, we know it when we see it, but how do we create it on command? One of the things that ruins the chance for romance is expectation.

Young families often have to find romance between moments of looking after young children whose needs are endless; some manage, and some get lost in the heavy lifting of parenthood and providing for the family.

How do we keep love and romance alive, or do our expectations of wanting it to be more than it is kill it? Love is a verb, and an action verb at that. Does a partner we can count on count more than one that brings out romantic gestures?

I know someone who said she never wanted to get flowers because she always got I’m sorry flowers. What a way to ruin a lovely gesture.

Many of us who’ve been married for years get to take things for granted, like sharing a cup of coffee, we get to go out with our partner without finding a date, and making big plans. We share the mundane and the spectacular, the highs and the lows.

Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze. Elinor Glyn

This year will be hard for those who lost their partner, and losing a partner is much more than losing romance. Those of us who have a partner should hold on a little tighter, share an extra cup of coffee or tea, hold hands, and enjoy the little things because that is what we will miss. The day-to-day pleasures we share, coming home to someone, and sharing meals.

Valentine’s Day is about romance, but life is about love, and sharing love, not just with our partners, makes the world go around. Can we reach out to others, find a way to make a difference in someone else’s life, and widen our circle even if romance eludes us?

To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides. David Viscott

The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love. Henry Miller

The love we give away is the only love we keep. Elbert Hubbard

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Thank you for reading my books, and a special thank you to those who leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item, I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.

Posted on by BWThomas

Choose wisely, but have the courage to choose.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

May your choices reflect your hopes, and not your fears? Unknown

If we have a choice, we should make what we think is the best choice. If we don’t choose, we’ll have to live with everyone else’s choice.

If we think our choices don’t matter, is that why we don’t make better choices or make any choice? If every choice we make in life builds our life, and it makes sense that it does, do we eliminate the worst choices and think of the long-term consequences before we make a choice?

As I sit writing this, my husband is listening to people complaining about the price of food, gas, eggs, and deodorant. What are we to make of the cost of food these days? We should realize how lucky we’ve been, and we might want to go back to the days of cheap food, and maybe we can, or maybe we can’t. I remember asking Mom about the price of food when she first got married in 1941, and she said they spent every penny they could on food. She told me they budgeted to the penny, and to buy her a Christmas present, her husband quit smoking to save up the money for her gift.

I’ve never budgeted to the penny, but I did take a calculator to the grocery store to keep our food bill in check, and maybe this practice should be brought back. We live in peace and plenty, and today we have choices to make, and in the end, those choices will add up to our lives. Will we look back and think we made the best choices, or will we think, if we could do it again, we’d make a different choice?

In the end that was the choice you made, and it doesn’t matter how hard it was to make it. It matters that you did. Cassandra Clare

Is it possible to make the best choice every time? Probably not, because we don’t know what the future holds, and if things go one way, choice A might be best, and if things go a different way, choice B might be best. In the middle of things, we might always question our choices, perhaps this is one of the laws of life. If this isn’t how life works, how could the Israelites who were freed from bondage in Egypt have longed to go back to what they left when they hit the hardships that freedom brought?

We want to keep the good we have, and the good that might come from a choice, and this can fill us with doubt. What if we stay where we are with what we know, instead of forging on to the Promised Land? That Promised Land might be a new job, getting married, starting a family, starting a business, moving to a new country, or even retiring and enjoying the golden years we’ve worked so hard for. No matter the choice we make, we will likely at some point look longingly back at where we were and the choices we didn’t make.

The more choices we have, the more dissatisfied we might be with the ones we made, or worse yet might not be able to bring ourselves to make a choice, and we sit on the fence of life waiting, hoping, and praying for the courage to make a decision that will propel us forward, but life is still moving forward even if we aren’t.

Not making a choice is a choice; we live with the consequences when we don’t choose. Making the best choice is probably better than living with the direction our life will take when we have to live with everyone else’s choices.

If we have a choice to make today, we should make it and get on with living our best life. The sum of daily choices adds up, and so does the sum of not making choices.

Who does more complaining after an election, those who voted or those who didn’t vote? In America, 90 million Americans didn’t vote in the last election, and that’s a bigger number than those who voted. Do you think those who didn’t vote are happier with everyone else’s choice than if they’d made a choice themselves?

There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist or accept the responsibility for changing them. Denis Waitley

It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you get off on sometimes. What matters most is getting off. You cannot make progress without making decisions. Jim Rohn

Our lives are fashioned by our choices. First we make our choices. Then our choices make us. Anne Frank

Thank you for reading this post. Please return and read more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

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Thank you for reading my books, and a special thank you to those who leave reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item, I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.

Posted on by BWThomas

Agreeing to disagree, finding common ground, and building a better life on our shared ideas.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

We can find common ground only by moving to higher ground. Jim Wallis

Finding common ground is something we have to focus on during a conflict. When we focus on what we have in common, we can see eye to eye. If we focus on what truths we share, our common goals, and our hopes for the future without alienating those we love, who don’t see things the same, we can build a good life. If we feel we must convince our loved ones or others to see things from our point of view that may never happen.

Somewhere between our points of view is the common ground where we both want the best for everyone, where we can find peace and a resolution to a problem that works for everyone. We need to find and cling to common ground.

Politics and religion have long been polarizing topics and since we will not convince the other person they are wrong, and they won’t convince us we are wrong, it is best to agree to disagree, find common ground, and leave these polarizing subjects to talk about with other people whose views are not so entrenched.

We meet on the common ground of an uncommon age and share out our gifts of dark and light, good and bad, simple joy and not so simple sorrow. Ray Bradbury

Is it possible to have polarizing beliefs and still find common ground to build a good life together, building communities, and countries? As we bring people together, we also bring diverse views on how life should be lived, the laws we should live under, and how countries should be shaped. But, there is a point where ideas overlap, and this is our common ground. We often focus on where we disagree not on where we agree, but if we want to bring harmony into our lives we need to focus on the common ground we share.

This sounds like good advice, but it is easy to get drawn into conversations where we don’t stick to common ground. I am guilty of this often, sometimes I bite my tongue so hard I’m afraid I might bite it off, and sometimes I forget to bite it and launch into a tirade.

Life is likely to get a lot more interesting over the next few months as politics in the U.S. sorts itself out and a new President is chosen. My job is not to let the divide in America become a divide in my home. We agree to disagree is my motto and remembering that motto in discussions is the challenge, as we discuss the hot topics of the day.

Can we agree to disagree, and find the common ground to build better relationships, communities, and countries?

The focus of our attention should be on finding common ground. Jana Echevarria

Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves. Virginia Woolf

No one is exempt from the call to find common ground. Barack Obama

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Thank you for reading my books and a special thank you to those who leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.

Posted on by BWThomas

We choose our response to what happens, and in that response lies our growth and freedom.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them. Gene Roddenberry

What does one write about after an event like the attempted assassination of Donald Trump? How should we react? Do we amplify, de-amplify, or have no reaction at all? Victor Frankl said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space in that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

How can we use situations to make better choices and become better people? This is what life is about, did we hug loved ones a little tighter, and give thanks that the world we know wasn’t thrown into chaos?

For most of us life today is pretty much what it has been every day. We will probably never fully understand why a young man wanted to tear down and destabilize his country, instead of working to build it up.

I listened to Jordan Peterson speaking about building a life of significance which is hard, and why some people try to become significant by tearing things down and destroying. “Ignore me now,” seems to be their cry.

Is this something new, or have we always had the dangerous disillusioned who want to blow things up, and create as much mayhem as they can? How do we help the dangerous and disillusioned use their energy for good? How do we help them direct it toward a worthy cause? Is there someone out there who knew this young man saying to themselves, “I should have reached out as a friend, mentor, teacher, or pastor, maybe contact with someone would have made a difference.”

If life is good for us, we are blessed, but not everyone is so blessed. If we have a family, friend, mentor, teacher, pastor, or other religious figure in our lives that encourages us maybe we should be looking around for those who need encouragement, friendship, and a meaningful path in life.

I never understood alienation. Alienation from what? You have to want to be part of something in order to feel alienated from it. Boyd Rice

What if alienation is the root of the problem and we need to find a way to help people feel less alienated, to help them find a way to use their gifts for good? I’ve never liked the idea it takes a village to raise a child, or that we are our brother’s keeper, because it’s always seemed like it takes personal responsibility from people. But, we’ve heard stories where someone turns their life around because of someone’s influence. When someone turns their life around we don’t know where the direction they were going was taking them. If they become a solid citizen we treat them like they’ve always been on that path, and we look at those on the wrong path the same way.

If we could have helped someone and didn’t, befriended someone but wouldn’t, or encouraged someone, does that missed opportunity for helping someone cling to us and impact our lives?

It might be great to aspire to be a leader of leaders, but most of us will not be a leader of leaders, we are regular people who hopefully are making the best of the life we have. If we are an encouraging person, a friend, and a mentor, we don’t know who we may encourage, whose outlook we may help to brighten, or what small impact we may make in someone’s life. Can we reach out to someone with an encouraging word, and a smile, and bring people into the fold who feel like outsiders?

Alienation is a form of living death. It is the acid of despair that dissolves society. Martin Luther King Jr.

You can’t put abandonment and alienation under arrest. Carrie P. Meek

Young alienation, disappointment and heartache is all part of the first real growing up that we do. Judd Nelson

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Thank you for reading my books, and a special thank you to those who leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.

Posted on by BWThomas

Our choices change us, to make life better we have to make better choices.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

Remember, the choices we make today shape the people we become tomorrow. Victoria Osteen

Are we lifelong learners, or did we quit learning anything new long ago? What counts as learning something new? Does doing something we’ve never done before count more than increasing our knowledge in areas in which we are already competent?

Do we not change things we’d like to change because we think it will make others uncomfortable? Do we worry if we change it will affect our relationships negatively?

Have we ever found ourselves doing something we thought would make the other person happy, and they were doing the same, but both would prefer something different?

This happens with my husband and I, we will be watching TV and he’s not watching something he wants to watch because he’s trying to watch something he thinks I will enjoy, but I’m not watching to watch, just being there spending time together.

He has started cycling and I’ve borrowed my sister-in-law’s bike so I can try it without a big commitment. I watched something on YouTube with my husband telling us there is no need to spend more than $6,000.00 for a good bike.

$6000.00 for a reasonable bike, I was thinking of picking one up at Canadian Tire. Am I out of touch, or is the YouTuber speaking to such a specific group that I have no business watching him?

I was reading a book talking about how too much research and wanting to buy only the best of the best can lead to less satisfaction. The author divided people into two groups, the maximizes who want the best of the best and are rarely satisfied, because there is always something better to find, and the satisficers who are content with good enough.

There is a choice you have to make in everything you do. So keep in mind that in the end, the choice you make, makes you. John C. Maxwell

When we are only going to buy once it is easy to think we want the best we can get. I’m reminded of a speaker I heard who said she had a choice of two houses, one she liked because it was pretty, and one she was told would be the best investment. She went with the best investment, then house prices declined, and she always regretted that she didn’t at least get to live in the pretty house.

Life is about choices, and we make them every day about how to spend our time and money. We might look at our lives and think we can’t make changes we want to make, but who is stopping us from taking up a new hobby, learning a new skill, or making some other change we’d like to see in our lives?

We are our control board, the decisions we make will determine our lives. There is a good deal of luck in life, and we aren’t in control of whether the book we write is found by someone who will publish it and make us famous, but we are in control if we write it.

Decisions we make daily can make our lives better or worse. Do we make bad things worse, bad things better, good things worse, or good things, better? If we make things worse we might end up bitter and wonder how so much bad happened to us.

Do we have a choice to make, can we make the best choice with the information we have, and then move on to our next choice?

No matter how bad things are, you can always make things worse. At the same time, it is often within your power to make them better. Randy Pausch

Take responsibility for your last bad decision, and then let it go. Don’t blame others or make excuses for yourself. Deepak Chopra

Exploring how you could make a hard situation worse can sometimes tell you what not to do. Harvey Mackay

Thank you for reading this post. Please come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

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Thank you to everyone who reads my books, and a special thank you to those who leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.

Posted on by BWThomas

Can we all make a difference, are we doing the best we can with the resources we have?

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

It’s your reaction to adversity, not adversity itself that determines how our life’s story will develop. Dieter f. Uchtdorf

Yesterday we went to the baptism of our daughter-in-law’s sister’s baby. She was not impressed with the event but we were thrilled to meet this little person. Last Thursday our grandson turned two. It is wonderful to be surrounded by babies. I won’t amass the number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren my mother did but if I can create happy memories for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren and leave them with a belief that the future can be as good for them as it has been for us, that is my wish.

On our way home our trusty truck sprung a leak in a hose and steam was spewing everywhere. A young man came up to the truck to tell us we had a problem. Sometimes I have to pinch myself because even this problem happening on our way home from the event happened at a better time than it could have. It could have happened on our way to the event and ruined our day, or happened when we had our grandson in the truck.

As our son and daughter-in-law drove me home, and my husband went with the tow-truck driver my son said, “I am thankful every day for the life I have.” He told me he gave a lift to a homeless man on Saturday and heard his tale of woe, and from the sounds of it, when things could get worse, they got worse, and people our tax dollars pay to help, aren’t doing a very good job. Some of the people down on their luck and homeless would accept help, but it seems real help is not easy for them to get.

Be kind. For everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Unknown

I’m not in the trenches, I don’t deal with the homeless, but I’ve heard stories, maybe we are trying to help the ones that don’t want to be helped, while the ones we could help to get back on their feet we let slip through the cracks until they too are beyond the little bit of help that would have been needed to tip them back into a life that would give them pride of independence.

We say we give people help, but when we speak to the people who are supposed to be receiving that help, we find they have to fight against a system that appears to kick them when they are down, withhold payments they are entitled to until we take all dignity away from them, and then we wonder why they become bitter and defeated. Is there a communication problem between those helping and those needing the help?

This is a tale told to me by my son, of a homeless man asking him if he thought he could get a job in the industry my son is in. He would need some training but it is an industry looking for workers and skilled work with a future. If he gets a hand up will he take it? How many people we see are looking for a hand-up, not a handout? How could we use the money we spend on the homeless to make a real difference? Are we making a real difference now but not hearing the success stories?

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate. To have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it. Helen Keller

Be someone’s strength. Be someone’s inspiration. Be someone’s reason to never give up. Unknown

Thank you for reading this post. Please come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

To subscribe, comment, and see archives or categories of posts click on the picture and scroll to the end.

Thank you for reading my books, and a special thank you to those who leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. if you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.

Posted on by BWThomas

Write your goals down and be willing to work hard to achieve them.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

Life without endeavor is like entering a jewel mine and coming out with empty hands. Japanese proverb

We’ve set our goals and we are so excited we over-share them with people. One of the things that happens is if we talk about what we want to do we feel as good as if we already accomplished it. Haven’t we all met people who talked so much about what they would do that they never got around to doing it?

It might be easier than we think to become those people. Another thing is we might give someone an idea who is looking for a project and they accomplish our project before we do. We might get very upset with them but we gave our idea away and someone else ran with it and maybe they did such a good job we no longer want to continue with ours.

I’ve found talking about what I am writing diminishes my writing. It makes it harder to write like the force moving me along died down. We have to not sabotage ourselves on the way to accomplishing what we set out to do. It is easy to get sidetracked, to put things off we know we should do, and to lose enthusiasm for what we’ve set out to do.

Sometimes we set goals for ourselves with too tight of a timeframe but if we give ourselves enough time we can make our goals come true. We might need to break our goals into smaller goals and as we accomplish the smaller goals we are on the way to accomplishing the big goal.

We also might need to focus on one goal instead of thinking we can accomplish everything on our list.  What if every year we chose one main goal in each area of our lives to focus on?  We might even have to look at the goals in the different areas of our lives and pick the one that would make the biggest difference if we achieved it.

What comes easy won’t last. What lasts won’t come easy. Unknown

Brian Tracy tells us the biggest thing we can do is write our goals down with a date to achieve them. We can always revise the date, but at least we have something to aim at, and being aimless is one of the reasons we don’t accomplish our goals. We keep them too amorphous, like wanting to travel somewhere, we won’t get where we want to go until we have an actual destination. If we don’t know the where, when, why, and how, we might have a wish but isn’t it a stretch to call it a goal?

Last night my husband was listening to David Goggins talking about his journey. I didn’t stay up to listen to him, but I heard him say he doesn’t pity anyone because if he can accomplish things anyone can. For him accomplishing anything has been hard, but he embraces the hard, and for most of us, if we want to accomplish something we will have to embrace the hard. There are hard parts to raising a family, working at a job, running a business, staying healthy and fit, keeping our relationships strong, and learning new things.

If we are only working toward our goals until it becomes hard we aren’t likely to accomplish all we are capable of. Getting past the hard parts of life is part of living the good life.

Without labor nothing prospers. Sophocles

The world belongs to the energetic. Emerson

Without hustle, talent will only carry you so far. Gary Vaynerchuk

Thank you for reading this post. Please come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

To subscribe, comment, and see archives or categories of posts click on the picture and scroll to the end.

Thank you to everyone who reads my books, and a special thank you to everyone who leaves a review on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item I receive a small percentage of the purchase price.

Posted on by BWThomas

Choosing what’s important. How we spend our days, is how we spend our lives.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

In every single thing you do, you are choosing a direction. Your life is a product of choices. Dr. Kathleen Hall

Would the girl or boy we were, be happy with the man or woman we’ve become? Wherever we are in life, what would we still like to do, what adventures would we still like to have, and what is still possible?

I see through Facebook that lots of people are having adventures, traveling the world, and living life to the fullest. Average people can do things that were beyond all but the rich in days gone by. We live our lives in peace and plenty; we have technology that makes it easy to share our adventures.

Telling our stories has never been easier and we are interested in different stories at different times in our lives. My daughter is watching women on YouTube sharing their stories of motherhood, potty training, and homemaking. My husband and I are watching RV’ers document their travels and lessons learned along the way. Do we want to find fitness experts, financial gurus, artists, and many others who will inspire us with what they are doing, and help us make decisions about what we want out of life?

We’ve always had choices but sometimes we thought there was something special about the people doing some of the things we’ve always wanted to do. What’s special about them is they are doers, and we are doers, we just have to decide what we want to do and then do it. Nothing happens until we change something we do every day.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. Victor E. Frankl

For years I wanted to write, I’ve always wanted to write, I even wrote it down in my journal when I was fifteen. Why did it take me this long to become a writer? Because, it wasn’t until October 9, 2000, that I started writing as a daily practice and kept it up. I documented how many words I wrote in the beginning, this helped me create a writing habit, and I still document how much I write each day. It’s a way to keep myself accountable but also I know when I wrote or edited that part of a novel.

We can’t do everything, we have to pick and choose how to spend our time and prioritize what is important by what we spend our time on. Writing in the morning works because often no one else is up, so it isn’t taking time away from anyone. We don’t want to be so efficient and productive that we don’t have time for those we love.

Success that comes at the expense of those we love will be empty. That said, if we spend all our time with those we love we might never get done what needs to be done and that won’t work well either. Balance is needed and it isn’t as easy as it seems to find balance in our lives fitting everything we want to fit in. It always seems something has to give; one of the balls we are trying to juggle must be put down to make way for something else.

Family is always the ball we must not put down, drop, or ignore. It is what gives our lives meaning, and purpose, and is the legacy we leave behind. When we are ninety-eight if we are lucky to live that long, family will be what is still left of all we have accomplished. If we have a grandson or granddaughter, or great-grandson or great-granddaughter that will visit us, kiss us on our cheek, tell us about their adventures, and how we helped them along the way, isn’t that what we want, what will make it all worthwhile, and give us peace? If a niece will come and spend time with us because we made time for them and they are making time for us.

If someone pops in with flowers because they are passing through, won’t that make our day? We all have choices until we don’t, are we making them count?

When people are not accepting toward themselves they are often obsessed with acceptance by others. Nathaniel Branden

Nonacceptance is always suffering, no matter what you are not accepting. Acceptance is always freedom, no matter what you are accepting. Cheri Huber

Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world, and perhaps even guiding them a little, is I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all. Franz Kafka

Thank you for reading this post. Please come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.

To subscribe, comment, and see archives or categories of posts, click on the picture and scroll to the end.

Thank you to those who read my books, and a special thank you to those who leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. If you click on the Amazon link and purchase an item, I receive a small percentage of the sale through the Amazon affiliate program.

Posted on by BWThomas

Taking charge of our money is taking charge of our life.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

Savings, remember, is the prerequisite of investment. Campbell R. Mcconnell

Are we scared to think about retirement even if it looms large? Do we calculate how much money we need to retire comfortably and know if we don’t sell our home, and even if we do, we might not have that astronomical number? Yet people retire every year, and most seem to manage. What is the secret the financial gurus who are scaring us aren’t telling us? Could it be that we don’t need an astronomical sum to retire and be okay?

Do-it-yourself investors – those who bought stock in quality companies, many of them paying dividends, and held the stock over long periods are the investors that have done well. We have many blogs and books telling us about dividend investing and how we can create a growing income, and we don’t need a million dollars according to Henry Mah author of Your TFSA Compounder, Income Investing Explained, Your Ever Growing Income, and Salary for Life.

We owe it to ourselves to take control of our financial life, and not be embarrassed that we weren’t able to amass the astronomical amount of money the financial industry tells us we need if we don’t want to eat dog food in our old age. One of the problems we have in my opinion is we don’t talk about money enough, and by not talking about it we don’t learn what there is to learn. Many people would rather talk about their sex life than their financial life if given a choice.

If we never save money or invest we will always be poor. No matter how much we earn. Unknown

In Canada, we have the Tax Free Savings Account (TFSA) available to us since 2009 which allows us to contribute a total of $88,000 if we were born before 1991. According to Henry Mah and others, using the TFSA over RRSPs will give us more money and if we have a choice of contributing to our TFSA or an RRSP we should choose the TFSA first in most cases.

Of course, not everyone agrees on this, but I trust someone that wants to help me manage and grow my money more than someone that wants fees to manage my money when it seems the most effective way to grow your money is without paying fees or taxes.

The more control we take in our life the better, whether it is our health, finances, or attitude. For the most part, we have to be our own control board. Who else can make us do what we need to do? Finding books, blogs, and podcasts that enlighten us might change the course of our lives. I think those who read Henry Mah’s books will find themselves offered possibilities they didn’t feel were open to them because they didn’t have millions saved for retirement.

None of this knowledge is hidden and yet so many of us don’t know it. We know we should live within our means and invest, and I think what causes a lot of us problems, is we think the little we could save and invest won’t make a difference, so why not spend what we have on little enjoyments?

Small amounts invested grow over time and the earlier we start the less we need to save because the power of compounding works for us. Those who turn eighteen now have the opportunity to invest in the TFSA their whole working lives. The rest of us could only invest in it since 2009 but the contribution limit we haven’t used accumulates, and we can take money out and replace it at a later date.

Knowledge is power. Information on many subjects is available to us, and the more we apply it to our lives the better our lives will be. Have we learned everything we should about creating a good retirement, or is there more to learn?

Do not save what is left after spending, but spend what is left after saving. Warren Buffet

Financial peace isn’t the acquisition of stuff. It’s learning to live on less than you make, so you can give money back and have money to invest. You can’t win until you do this. Dave Ramsey

Earn as much as you can. Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. Give as much as you can. Rev John Wellesley

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