I am so glad that The Difference has helped so many see the steps we can take in our lives to make ourselves financially healthy and happy. More than that, I’m happy to report that — to date — the Books for A Better Life Awards has raised $1.6 million for MS research. MS awareness is so pertinent and crucial today – over 400,000 Americans alone live with this disease.
If you’d like more information about MS — and how you can help, click here.
If you’d like more information about The Difference, click here.
What motivates you? Is it money? Is it something else entirely? And if it is money, how much will it take to get you to take an action you might have otherwise avoided?
When the action in question is losing weight and keeping it off, the results of a new study seem to indicate that money may not do the trick. Here’s what went down according to The New York Times:
“Researchers studied 2,407 overweight and obese people enrolled in weight-loss schemes at their jobs. Participants were divided into three groups. The first received $60 for keeping a 5 percent weight loss for a year. The second agreed to pay about $100; the money would be returned if they lost 5 percent of their weight, and they would get bonuses for losing more. The third, a control group, was offered only $20, a reward for staying in the program for a year. The study , published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that money had very little effect. The group that was offered $60 lost an average of just 1.4 pounds, while the controls lost 1.8. Those who made the $100 deposit dropped an average of 1.9 pounds more than the controls, but, the authors write, people motivated enough to risk their own money would most likely have lost weight with any program.”
Personally, I think the problem with this study was that there wasn’t enough money at stake. More…
Starting this week, every Thursday I’ll be dedicating my blog post for the day to answering one of your financial questions. This week’s comes from Patsey in Woodland North Carolina. She writes:
I have a 22 year-old daughter who begins work as a nurse in July. I have recommended the asset allocation (early career in your book The Difference) after she saves up 8 months in expenses in cash or money market fund. Do you have a better recommendation or did I miss the mark?
Answer: In a perfect world, we would all have 8 months in living expenses in the bank. The reality is however, that putting that much in the bank, especially when you’re starting out, can be a daunting task.
Yesterday Karen Blumenthal stopped by my radio show to discuss her new book “The Wall Street Journal Guide to Starting Your Financial Life.” Starting small, Blumenthal says, is a key thing for workforce newbies to remember. “The first paycheck you might have immediate living needs…you don’t want to run up debt. You need to commit some of each paycheck to build that fund. Start with even $25 and then increase it. In every paycheck you should aim for as much as 10%. If you can’t do that right off the bat start with what you can do,” said Blumenthal. More…
As the middle schoolers in my community — and my house — are gearing up for the performances of Annie, and I gear up for my interview with Elizabeth Edwards, the catchily annoying phrases from Tomorrow are stuck in my brain. The red-headed moppet trying to convince President LBJ that brighter skies are right around the corner was one thing — that was fiction. Edwards recent spate of interviews have yet to answer the question for me: How, in the face of all the bad news she has had to face, does she do it? Can we use her tactics to get ourselves through the day? More…
Last night I saw Little Shop Of Horrors for the third time this week. The first two were at my son’s high school. He was in the chorus and had a small part in an ensemble of 50. The third was at Columbia University where my fiance’s daughter directed a cast of 8. On my night off in between, I went to a meeting with scores of other parents at my daughter’s middle school where she is auditioning for a production of Annie. And there, the director put the entire week into perspective.
The play is not the thing, he said, daring to disagree with Hamlet. It is not about the two or three nights in front of an audience for applause. It is about, as he put it in his enviable British accent, “the pro-cess” of a group of kids becoming a company of actors who cooperate to build a show. It is about the time spent tableu-ing scenes, discussing their meaning, researching the time period, and of course learning songs and lines and steps. That is why, he said, the few kids who drop out after getting smaller parts than they (or their parents) felt they deserved inevitably come back and see the show and wish they’d stuck with it. Those kids see that they missed a journey. It’s the journey — the pro-cess — that makes them happier than even the end result.
It’s very much what the excellent Judith Warner blogged about in today’s Domestic Disturbances column for The New York Times website. More…
I was on CNN this morning, talking about The Difference and its driving question: How to move from a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle into financial comfort or even wealth. Take a look below:
I joined Carmen Wong Ulrich on her CNBC show On The Money last night to talk about The Difference. She focused on the power of saving, as do most of the wealthy and financially comfortable people I surveyed for the book: 55% of the wealthy said that saving was one of the big factors in getting them there.
I spent yesterday at Bryant University in Rhode Island with 900 women — telling them about The Difference — and how it is my belief that they are the only ones who have the power to take themselves from a life of financial struggle to one of financial success. We talked about optimism, resilience, connectedness — and how I believe today as I always have you have to do the work. And they got it. These women, like so many Americans, and I think like almost every hearty Rhode Islander, were not — they are not — looking for a free pass. More…
In my seventh grade chorus class, there was a boy with sandy blond hair and freckles. He sat behind me and he had “it.” The boys wanted to hang with him. The girls just wanted to be near him. He was popular. I didn’t live in that town long enough to know if he grew up to be prom king. But later, I — and everyone else in America — watched him motivating a bunch of pros to become the youngest Super Bowl-winning coach in history.
As I dug into the data for The Difference: How Anyone Can Prosper In Even The Toughest Times, I was particularly interested to see if popularity at a young age was tied to success and wealth in adulthood. More…
That was what President Obama asked us to do in his Saturday radio address — to be open to discovering “great opportunity in the midst of great crisis.” In other words, be resilient — a key component of The Difference.
It’s not only possible, but I am starting to hear the sort of stories and examples that we should all be not just listening to but learning from — and being inspired by. Marcia, from Sacramento, for instance. Marcia called my Oprah Radio show on Friday. The dismal jobs number had just come out and we were talking not about crying in our beers but about where the opportunities actually were. Marcia’s job — she didn’t say what — had been eliminated about six months earlier. She’d given herself a few days to have a pity party but that was it. Then she started to think about what she could do to make some money in these tough times to keep herself afloat. More…
Established in 1996, the annual New York City – Southern New York Chapter of the National MS Society’s Books for a Better Life Awards highlight the top self-improvement books in 10 categories, to raise money and awareness for Multiple Sclerosis research. Last night, during the awards ceremony at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in New York City, my book The Difference: How Anyone Can Prosper In Even The Toughest Times was honored as the 2009 Book for a Better Life in the Personal Finance category.
What motivates you? Is it money? Is it something else entirely? And if it is money, how much will it take to get you to take an action you might have otherwise avoided? 
Starting this week, every Thursday I’ll be dedicating my blog post for the day to answering one of your financial questions. This week’s comes from Patsey in Woodland North Carolina. She writes:
That was what President Obama asked us to do in his Saturday radio address — to be open to discovering “great opportunity in the midst of great crisis.” In other words, be resilient — a key component of The Difference.
