Julie Stav - The Money in You!: Discover Your Financial Personality and Live the Millionaires Life

Have you ever wondered why some people seem to make their money multiply like little rabbits while others struggle just to make ends meet? Do you have trouble understanding how your spouse can sleep soundly at night while you toss and turn, worried about money? Where do you find the answers you need to avoid mistakes or, as it happens so often to many of us, find the way out of the money bind you are in?

We all know that financial books deal with just that: financial matters. The good ones can help us understand the financial lingo, teach us moneymaking techniqueswhen to buy, when to sell. But the story doesnt end there.

Bound up in our relationship to money, we find our personalities, our temperaments, our hopes, our fears, and our self-esteem. In my years as a financial planner, an author of investment books, a teacher, and a TV and radio host of call-in financial shows, I have learned that true and permanent financial freedom is impossible to achieve by addressing only one of these issues at a time. Feelings and finances are inescapably connected.

Even in the stock market, the most successful investors know that fortunes are made and lost primarily due to emotional decisions that are made en masse . Thats why market pundits have developed psychological indicators to measure the amount of fear, greed, and hope of investors. Have you ever heard of day traders? These market opportunists buy and sell stocks by taking advantage of the emotional momentum that drives a stock price up or down during the course of a day. Their investing decisions are not based on a companys fundamental analysis of earnings per share growth or return on equity. Instead, they sell into the feeding frenzy that occurs when the buzz is created around a certain stock, often discounting whether it has the characteristics that would merit such price increases. Money decisions are uniquely shaped by the personality traits in each one of us, and successful investors have learned to maneuver within their own comfort level. Even the stock market has its own personality!

Thats way over my head, you may say. I just know that all my problems would be solved if I could figure out how to pay next months rent. Well, guess what? Your immediate problem may be solved when you find the money you need for your rent, but you could find a permanent solution to your worries by discovering your personality strengths and how they relate to your financial decisions. If institutional investors and market tycoons acknowledge the importance of the emotional power behind investment decisions, how can we afford to overlook this important factor in our own personal dealings with money?

Mechanical recipes of what to do and not do with our money mean very little unless we are aware of the invisible but powerful forces that propel us either toward or away from our goals. Research has shown that these forces have nothing to do with intelligence, logic, level of education, age, or ethnic origin. Instead, they have everything to do with our behavioral DNAour personality type.

Each one of us relates to money in a unique way, and when we understand the personal relationship we have with money and how our personal temperament influences us, we are more than halfway on our path to financial freedom. Once we figure out how to bring subliminal money issues to the forefront, we can amplify those that move us closer to our goals and defuse the ones that sabotage our lives.

In this book, I will help you understand the root of your money decisions (or indecisions) by offering you practical tools that will identify your strengths. Once you identify your money personality, use the list of financial alternatives that will work with your natural instincts and cultivate your strengths rather than your weaknesses. Let me show you how to maximize what you already have. After all, why would you insist on writing with your left hand if you were meant to be right-handed?

Tall order, you say? Not really. You may find it in the first chapter, or not until you are well into the book, but the secret key to your golden door lies within the pages of this bookif you are willing to look at the image in the mirror as if you had just met for the first time. I invite you to go on a treasure hunt with me. Together, we will find the magical missing piece to your financial puzzlethe real you!

J ill is a successful advertising executive. Poised and well-read, she has fabulous friends in high places, boundless ambition, and a knack for working a room. Jill navigates her day with the easy confidence of someone who knows her opinion matters.

At the end of a long day, she settled down in the backseat of the taxi taking her to her studio apartment, and mentally replayed the accomplishments of that afternoon. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to savor the memory of her well-deserved praise following a meeting with the creative department.

The next days presentation looked very promising indeed. Jill planned to land the largest account ever for her company, and she couldnt help but feel giddy with pride as she imagined the respect and recognition the deal would bring hernot to mention a delightful bonus! Jills success was a result of the acumen she displayed while assembling her winning team, coupled with her meticulous, yet surely indispensable, supervision. It was hard to believe that it had taken almost two years, but the probable outcome of the next days presentation would make it all worth it.

As her taxi bumped along the busy commercial streets, an object of exquisite beauty was illuminated against the gray of the cityscape. Jills eyes opened wide, fixing upon an emaciated mannequin in the highly stylized window of a luxury department store. Stop, please! she cried, hurling some money at the confused driver. Ill get out here!