Paper or Plastic? Growing Wealth By Carrying Cash In Your Wallet
Many business leaders quickly realize that entrepreneurship is a mindset, a lifestyle that can be carried through in almost all areas of personal development.
From daily self-discipline strategies to enhancing mental flexibility, the traits of a successful entrepreneur often lead to simple ‘truths’ in how they perceive and manage money. Becoming wealthy with your business isn’t based on the ‘greed’ mentality, or even the old-fashioned concepts of competition and battling for scarce resources. Understanding how to build wealth involves a few fundamental principles such as:
- Creating something of value to others, something that cannot be found anywhere else
- Finding a way to build residual income from this value
- Taking steps to maximize your productivity so you work less but still make more
- Setting goals to achieve higher levels of income
- Learning how to manage income so you can generate wealth 24 hours per day
Personal development gurus such as Steve Pavlina offer some valuable insights and commentary on how to practice ‘wealthy thinking’ on a daily basis.
But there’s one simple action that you can take to get started: begin by carrying more cash in your wallet.
The premise behind this is actually quite simple:
When you surround yourself with money, you subconsciously don’t have a ‘need’ to spend.
Try it now, and you’ll see this working even in its most subtle forms. Credit cards and even debit cards can give you a false confidence in ‘access’ to money; when you find yourself going out and spending away, it’s probably in some form of plastic payment. Switch to cash instead, and you can become more mindful of the entire process of thoughts about money, as it happens.
You’ll also find yourself feeling abundant. You will have cash in your hands that has potential to be spent, but you are much less likely to actually go ahead and spend it.
You’ll start changing your beliefs of what you consider to be a large amount of money: try carrying around a week’s worth of income for a while and just take note of how you feel. This makes you much more mindful of what your weekly income is worth to you, and can even help you organize your priorities for expenses and spending around it.
You’ll quickly become less attached to money; since you know you have it, it won’t be something that you’re constantly grasping for. This will give you breathing room to set higher goals, and make it easier to visualize larger sums of money beyond your current level.
The act of simply carrying more cash in your wallet can help get you started on your wealth building strategies. Feel free to share your results, tips, or how you made it work for you!
9 Comments
Victor
September 8th, 2007 at 11:10 am
Very interesting, I’ll have to try it out. I use to always carry cash, but now I do plastic. I thought hey its easier. But I can see what you are saying. I never thought of it that way, but i do remember those same the feelings. Hm. cool. Maybe its time to try it again.
pazion
September 8th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Sabah,
well said,
The “how to” of building wealth is a well tested and recommended approach. It is the ‘value adding’ effort that comes back to launch our financial shuttle.
The carrying cash, is a different concept that I will test it.
thanks
Sabah
September 8th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
Building wealth ’subconsciously’ is the first step towards making it a reality; try as many strategies as you can and you’ll start to see some new patterns developing!
lawrence
September 8th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
this is good - this should be practiced by teenagers and young adults even more so.
it’s one thing to pull out the plastic, but another to see and actually hold and feel every penny you’re ‘throwing’ away
Tim Spangler
September 8th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
I was looking at my steadily-increasing credit card bills over the last year and realized that I use my credit card like a charge card - I pay it in full every month like and have never carried a balance.
So why not just use cash?
Granted, I’m building credit but I remember I used to do much less frivolous spending back before I had a credit card. I’m going to try carrying around half a stack (maybe not that much!) or so and see how it changes my thoughts on life and money.
Thanks for the tip, and you’ve got a great blog here.
David Askaripour
September 8th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
Excellent advice, Sabah! This definitely makes sense — carrying cash on us will help us to build our awareness and consciousness around money. It’ll help us to focus and be more aware of it. Thanks for this advice
Em
September 10th, 2007 at 6:15 am
Fantastic advice.
Credit cards never feel like real money to me, it’s a piece of plastic, and when I’ve bought something it goes back in my pocket and I can keep buying with it. But with money I’m much more aware of what I’m wasting my money on and how hard I worked to get the money in the first place because with cash in hand you realise that once it’s gone, it’s gone.
Sabah
September 10th, 2007 at 8:32 am
Believe it or not, you can actually make credit cards to your advantage. They can be excellent ‘practice’ for acquiring and paying off small amounts of debt, giving you a purpose for every purchase and some breathing room to make larger purchases.
Still, you have to be VERY aware of how much those items you charge are really costing you. It’s a good idea to tack on about 10-20% of the price on most things you buy with a credit card; this is usually the ACTUAL cost of the item you’ll be paying in a few months vs. paying cash up front and not accumulating interest charges and other fees on the total.
Happy spending
Laura
September 11th, 2007 at 1:06 am
This is an interesting article. For those who are trying this, will you please post your results? I am curious how this works out for different people.
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