It’s a few weeks before my favorite holiday of the year.
Everything seems to slow down for Thanksgiving.
When I was growing up, Thanksgiving meant turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and my mom’s cranberry frozen desert.
The frozen cranberry dessert was a mix of cranberries, sugar, whipping cream and pure deliciousness.
As I grew older, my tastes have changed.
Now I prefer ham to turkey, and I have a new favorite dessert.
Pecan Pie.
Pecan pie is the desert of the heroes and aspiring heroes.
A pecan pie consists of three perfectly matched layers – flakey pie crust, gooey, sweet feeling, pecans.
These three layers accent the best of each other and make for a scrumptious thanksgiving desert.
I love pecan pie.
I’ve never met a pecan pie that I didn’t like.
Yet, I’ve never made a pecan pie.
I’ve always taken the path of least resistance and bought a frozen pecan pie from the grocery store.
This Thanksgiving will be different.
I’ll be gathering my family around the kitchen, and we will start a new tradition of baking a family pecan pie.
I’m searching for an amazing pecan pie recipe.
If you have a pecan pie recipe that you love, please send it to me.
All this talk of pecan pie is making me hungry for that delectable treat.
Pecan pie has a simple recipe, including corn syrup, butter, brown sugar, and, most importantly, pecans.
I bring up pecan pie because I learned a valuable lesson about money from the humble pecan pie.
I’ve been in the money industry for 20 years, and many people get confused about money.
Money is a taboo subject that is impolite to talk about in most conversations.
Many people downplay the importance of money.
Yet when they don’t have money these same people decry money.
I’ve made it my life’s work to help people understand and get control of their money.
People are very guarded about their money.
Money is an intimate subject that people want to keep private.
Everyone makes mistakes with money, and these mistakes become a source of extreme shame.
Most people work hard for their money.
Many people tie their self-worth to the amount of money in their bank account.
When there is a lot of money in their bank account, their self-worth is high.
When the money diminishes from their bank account, their self-worth plummets.
There is a tremendous amount of misinformation spread about money.
This misinformation leads to confusion.
One person who is confused about money passes their misguided information to another person.
What results is a tangled mess about one of the most important subjects in our lives.
Money is so important to our lives that we spend no time educating the next generation about the keys to becoming a master of our money.
Instead, we get messages like:
- It’s only money.
- I’d rather be happy than have money.
- Rich people aren’t happy.
- I can’t afford that.
- Money doesn’t grow on trees.
These messages we hear and share with people lead to further confusion about money.
Let me be crystal clear.
Money is one of the easiest subjects to understand.
Money is a valuable tool to give us insight on what we value in life.
I once heard someone tell me, “Show me your bank account and your calendar, and I’ll tell you what you value.”
The way we use our time and our money are the clearest indicators of what we value.
Most people transform a large part of their week into money by the work they perform.
In my early twenties, I read these words of George S. Clason in his classic book “The Richest Man in Babylon.”
“If you have not acquired more than a bare existence in the years since we were youths, it is because you either have failed to learn the laws that govern the building of wealth, or else you do not observe them.”
There is a simple explanation of why one does not have money.
There are two causes of a lack of money.
- Either one does not understand the laws governing money or
- One does not obey the laws governing money.
It’s black and white.
Having money is kind of like being pregnant.
Either you have money, or you do not.
Cash is in the bank account, or it is not.
Which brings me back to the thing that makes my heart shine with delight.
The humble pecan pie.
The pecan pie taught me how to understand money.
Imagine for a minute that every morning, you are given a pecan pie.
You have just enough pecan pie to last you for today.
When the pecan pie is gone, it is gone.
You can eat the whole pecan pie for breakfast, but then you will have to go hungry for the remainder of the day.
You could split the pie into three pieces and have one piece of pie for breakfast, one piece of pie for lunch, and one piece of pie for dinner.
You could cut a slice of your pecan pie and share it with a friend or family member.
You could cut a slice of pecan pie and put it in the freezer for a day when the pecan pie baker gets sick and is not able to bring you your pumpkin pie.
If you placed a slice of pecan pie in the freezer each day, soon you would have pecan pie for a rainy day.
Everything is simple about the pecan pie until one makes a disastrous decision.
That disastrous decision occurs when a person eats more than one pecan pie a day.
When a person eats more than one pecan pie, they overindulge in pecan pie.
They have to rob from tomorrow’s pecan pie to eat more pecan pie.
As people overindulge in pecan pie, their appetite for pecan pie grows beyond one pecan pie a day.
However, those same people are only given one pecan pie a day.
Those people are eating pecan pie beyond their pecan pie means.
As long as a person doesn’t eat more than one pecan pie a day, that person will have enough pecan pie.
When I translate my pecan pie message into how money works, it is the same.
Every day we get a money pie.
As long as we don’t eat more of our money pie than we have each day, we will be fine.
We will have enough money.
However, when we eat more of the money pie than we have, we become indebted to others.
Our appetite to eat money grows, and we travel toward a vicious downward spiral that leads to permanent debt.
That debt puts in shackles that weigh us down.
The first step to gaining control over money is to live each day on the money pie that we have for that day.
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