By Jim Del Vecchio
Do you have prosperity and abundance in your life? If not, you may wonder when you will get it. You may also wonder how to get it. Looking at the issue of abundance from a spiritual viewpoint, I intuitively feel that many are not aligning with their abundance because of what they are thinking, feeling, and doing. If you need help moving past these obstacles, there are some tips you can use to help shift the operation of your mind so that you will be more open to the divine flow of abundance in the future.
It’s important to note that abundance includes much more than financial success. It spans to all major areas of your life: spiritual, physical, intellectual, emotional, social, and livelihood. The acronym I use for these areas is SPIESL. For purposes of this article, however, we will be focusing more on money and how you handle it in your life.
Before getting more detailed, it’s important to state that money is not evil. There is nothing wrong with it at all. It is neutral. How you get it and what you do with it is what makes it seem like it can be good or bad.
It is really the choices people make that determine if it seems money is being used for good or for not-so-good purposes.
Managing the Abundance of Money
Money is just what comes to us all by using energy to work, save, and invest. Let’s look at those last three in more detail.
WORK: The first step is how you get money. Some are born with a “silver spoon” in their mouth, but most of us have to work to make a living. How do you make your living? Is it honest? Does it honor yourself and others? Or does the work call on you to be less than honest or ethical? If you are steadfastly holding to work that is uplifting—work that you feel good about—it will aid you in manifesting abundance. Positive feelings will stimulate the secretion of healthy chemicals that will course through your body. The resulting vibration you send out to the universe can lead to many positive changes in your life. Changes beyond prosperity. The positive changes could be a new or improved relationship, better physical health, more stable emotions, better relations with friends and family and more.
How you acquire money falls into the arena of choosing the right career for you. It may be a career where you work for an employer or it may be that you will be the employer. In either case, I believe if you conduct yourself with high ethics and values, treat people well, and basically give a diligent effort to your tasks, you probably will be successful. Once you are successful, usually more money follows in the form of raises or increased business.
SAVE: After you get money, what do you do with it? Do you squander it on gifts or expenditures that are too expensive, not needed, spur of the moment buys, or fad buys? Learning to complete and stick to a budget is very helpful. When you have enough money, do you store up the excess in a financial institution for investment purposes or for a “rainy day” or do you help charity with it now? My research into spirituality seems to suggest that when we get enough and more than enough, we might be doing ourselves a favor by helping those less fortunate. That’s not to say you cannot have fun. My advice is to save, save, save and then when you obtain a critical mass, then start giving more to charity.
The sad fact is most Americans are not saving nearly enough for themselves and will face a difficult future unless they make big changes now.
An easy way to find out now much you will need to save is to determine what you spend now and add an amount for inflation into the future. The long-term inflation rate is about 3 percent, so you might add 3 percent each year as you project into the future. Most financial planners say we should have enough money to provide about 80 percent of what we were making before we retired. They also use a conservative rate of return of 5 percent to estimate income on your investments. Let’s say you will get Social Security of $15,000 a year and want another $15,000 a year income. To get an income of $15,000 a year at a 5 percent rate of return on your investments, you will need to save $300,000. If you have a company pension, that will lessen the amount of investments you need. It is easy to see from this simple example that many people need to do more to plan for their future.
INVEST: The next principle is, “How do you grow your money.” Do you stick it in a bank, put it under your pillow, bury it in tomato cans in your backyard? Or do you work at it a little bit to find the best ways to invest your money? It turns out the stock market is one of the best investments for the long term. In the book, Manifesting Abundance: The Universal Key, I go over a four-step process for beating the best money managers in the world on five minutes a week. For now I will just say it is not as hard as you might think. Adding a little bit of knowledge to what you already know makes all the difference.
Stocks have a long-term record of gaining about 10 percent per year. That figure includes all the down years as well as the up years. The up years can be substantial and so can the down years. If you are nearing retirement or in retirement, you would not want to take on all the risk that comes with the market, so I suggest a “conservative growth” strategy that captures most of the market gains and avoids most of the losses.
If you can get 1 percent more return on your investments over the long term, that can lead to big changes in your retirement nest egg. To illustrate the power of a combination of saving and investing, if a young person saved just $5.00 a day and put it into a Roth IRA at a 10 percent rate of return for 40 years, it would grow to more than $888,000. If they increased their saving rate to $5.70 a day and got just 1 percent more rate of return, their account after 40 years would amount to over $1,343,000. The moral is clear: If you need to start making changes, do it now. Even small changes can add up to large amounts over time.
Industrious action, thrift, and investing one’s resources wisely are values that spiritual people have espoused for millennia.
Every faith tradition that I am aware of extols the virtue of such principles. They also extol the virtue of helping the poor and sick people of the world. By having more money by making wiser choices, we can put ourselves in a position to have more fun and live a nicer lifestyle but also to be able to help more people who are in need.
Jim Del Vecchio is the author of Manifesting Abundance: The Universal Key, available in paperback or ebook from Amazon.com or audiobook from jimdelvecchio.com.