Do you have a story that you’re not good with money? Have you ever tried “prosperity work” and it didn’t work for you? Do you experience confusion or upset in financial matters?

If you would rather feel grounded and relaxed, supported and excited, or competent and confident, then come experience a heart-centered way of being with money!

In this 6-week experiential class we will explore the underpinnings of prosperity and abundance work along with how and why it sometimes goes awry. Come learn:

• How can you feel more confident and be more competent with money?
• What is your history with money and how does it impact you today?
• What are your intentions and beliefs are and how to make them work for you?

We will create a deep understanding of choice for ourselves through curiosity and inquiry, self-exploration, and truth telling. You will receive information, insight and support on your financial journey and have a great time doing it!

This work is emotional, intuitive, and practical and is designed to holistically integrate all your different parts and pieces leaving you feeling nourished, grounded and available to move forward with intention and focus.

This course is for you if you:
• Think you’re not good with money
• Find yourself accidentally in business for yourself
• Are “intuitive” or “non-linear” or an artist
• Have ever done “prosperity” or “abundance” work/magic and it didn’t work
• Want hope or clarity about money

I look forward to seeing you there! Please contact Briana with any questions: briana@infinitelypossible.net or 510.282.1970

Briana Cavanaugh is a long-time financial coach, accounting consultant and witch. She took done everything from welfare mom to successful entrepreneur and loves supporting people in transformation. With a background in finance, technology, priestessing, and activism she combines the practical with the ephemeral to help individuals, couples and executive teams uncover their values and work in alignment with their truth. You can see more about her work at www.infinitelypossible.net

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Details What To Do When Prosperity Work Doesn’t
6 – Thursday evenings
Dates: Thursdays 9/29/11-11/3/11
Time: 7-10pm (starts promptly)
Location: SF location near public transit, given upon registration

Cost: $300, $50 deposit sent via paypal to briana@infinitelpossible.net holds your space. Payment plans available – some scholarship and work trade available, please ask!

One of the reasons I was loving it was that he also has a section about personal values. It looks like thisersonal Values:

Personal Values
Discover how you are seen now: Ask your community who they see you as now, what gifts you bring, and what style they see you presenting. Don’t focus on what they think your brand should look like, instead just find out what they see today.
Values: List 5 simple reasons WHY it is good for the world that you are in business.
Essence: What is the single MOST valuable thing you do as a business person?
Keywords: What 5 keywords best define your business identity, values, and essence?

I find that having key, core values is something that shows up all over. It’s how people know who we are, it’s how we know who are customers are, it’s how we can get good at what we do and it defines our relationship to community – whether that’s family, friends or work.

But that’s not all there is to it. John lays out his method for creating a solid brand. I’ve been through this material with him and he’s stellar at it. I highly recommend him.

Take a look at your two lowest scores.

Now breathe. (Feel free to hear the judgement out, but that’s not what we’re here for.)

Those two lowest scores are the places in your life that need the most attention. Those are the places in your life that you need a bit of extra attention.

If you look through that list again of what you spent, you’ll probably find that you’re money – how you’re using it or how you’re not – plays into those values.

If that’s true, it’s time to figure out what you’re doing and how to change that. If this is something that you’ve done over and over again likely it’s a habit. What you’ve done is create a neuronal pathway in the brain – a groove that you’ve moved neurons in over and over. So you can’t not do that just by trying to stop. It doesn’t work that way.

In order to not do that any more, you actually have to replace the habit with a new action or thought.

So if, for example, when you get stressed out you think “I can’t do this.” And then you buy bath products, or cosmetics, or shoes (or food or cars or…, it’s time to make a different decision. For me I decided to breathe and say an affirmation. One of my affirmations is, “Everything’s going to be ok.” I take another breath and say to myself, “Self, oh look, everything is ok now.” That gives me enough time to take a couple of deep breath which clears away some of the adrenalin and that fight or flight response. That brings me back into a place of having a shot at making a clear decision.

If you feel like all of your scores are low, I recommend only tackling one score at a time. Trying to change everything at once is a recipe for failure and a form of self-sabotage. Success is all about taking one step at a time, mastering it, acknowledging that success, and then getting ready to do the next one.

And don’t stop tracking. One month is just the beginning to understanding what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Tracking the the very basic key to all things money.

Information is power!

It must be prized and cherished
It must be chosen from among alternatives
It must be chosen freely, without coercion
It must be chosen after thoughtful consideration of the consequences of each alternative, not impulsively, and after careful critical thinking.
We must be willing to publicly affirm it
We must act on it, and act on it repeatedly
It must be consistent with the other values we profess or claim to hold

So, do you know what you value most? What do your care about deeply and passionately? What prompts you to make decisions? Here are the steps I use with my clients to determine their core values.

Write down your core values – the ones that represent the essence of who you are. Start with a brainstorm and come up with your big long list of values. Then, go through and notice the ones that are the same or similar (ie integrity and honesty can be the same for some people).

Then, go over the list being much more selective and narrow it down to your top five or six.

Then take each value and spend a bit of time summarising what it means to you personally and why it matters. Write it down. Refine it. Play with it. Really create understanding for yourself about what is and is not important to you.

So if you have chosen honesty, write down what being honest means to you. Does it mean actually telling the deepest truth that you can in every moment? Does it mean not lying or telling half truths? Does it mean setting boundaries? Write your definition alongside each value.

Then the next step is to prioritise them. You can do this by asking yourself ‘if I could only have one thing from my money, would it be this?’ This helps you decide what really matters to you.

Finally, ask yourself how far your current spending is allowing you to honor these values. Rate each one on a scale of 1 – 10 to indicate the extent that these core values are present in your money life right now. Remember that some of your values will probably change with time so if you have a child, get married or divorced change jobs or have big life changes, try this exercise again to see what’s shifted for you.

If the ratings are low, it’s time to read: Part Three – Spending Money in Alignment with your Values!

As it turns out, this is what they were talking about.

Just to be clear, when you’re asking people what their worries are about money, chances are, money will be on the list.

Lame.

The moral of the story: get the data first, then write the headline.

Budget: noun

an estimate of income and expenditure for a set period of time : keep within the household budget.
an annual or other regular estimate of national revenue and expenditure put forward by the government, often including details of changes in taxation.
the amount of money needed or available for a purpose : they have a limited budget.

The thing that makes it complicated is how we feel about the budget. But let’s leave that off for a minute, just know that it’s there.

The budget is just a way to estimate or plan for what’s going to happen.

Alright, so what is important about budgets on a larger scale? Changing them.

There are really 2 basic ways to change a budget: add income or subtract expenses. Make more money (effect top line), spend less money (effect bottom line). If you look at a profit and loss report which accounts for income and expenses for a set period in the past the income is at the top and the expenses are at the bottom. Budgets mimic that layout.

One of the traps of the US’s federal budget is that there’s this conversation that says that we have to spend less. And that’s certainly an option. But the other option is to make more money.

So while the conversation has been focused recently on cutting spending, take a look at this article about what happened 10 years ago. People forget that tax cuts actually cost money. Giving those tax cuts was basically giving the federal government and pay cut – it reduced income to the government. That means there are less resources for… well, anything.

Now whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing, having the conversation outside of acknowledging what’s happened does funny things to the conversation. It has an impact on our emotions and influences our decisions because it limits our choice. It keeps us in the dark. It also isolates and directs our attention to what “people in power” want us to see. One of the most powerful concepts, in my opinion, that we can be teaching about in the world is choice. How to look at our options, analyze them and make decisions based on as much information as possible while still being in integrity with ourselves.

I believe it’s important to contribute to community. I think public libraries are important and roads and transit and safety net services. And I’m willing to contribute to them. So increasing income for the federal government seems like a viable option to me.

The lesson here for me is: what do I want to look at? Do I want to worry about how much I’m spending or do I want to focus on increasing, stabilizing and creating income? Well both. But if I focus only on expenses, the income tends to slip away. Both sides of the equation are important to look at.

I was talking to some folks the other day that made me realize again that for most people money is their life’s energy. That we – most of us – trade our time, energy, brain power and often our passion and love, for those small green pieces of paper (or a reasonable facsimile there of).

WHen we spend that money we are doling out our life’s energy. If you earn $45/hour and that new pair of shoes is $135, do you really want to trade 2 hours for those shoes?

It gets even more complicated when we think about taxes. If about a third of our income goes to taxes (which is true for many middle class folks) then it’s more like 4 hours of your time. Half of a day’s work if you’re on a 40 hour work week.

A similar question is: are you giving yourself away? If a salaried employee consistently does 10 hours of over time, they are actually getting paid far less per hour than they do if they only work their 40 hours a week. But we often don’t count those little things: the coffee, the extra couple of hours on a project, the extra 25 miles I drove (four times a week to help a friend which is probably about 4 tanks of gas plus wear and tear on the car, plus time, plus….

Just to be clear, the point is not to have negative judgements about what you’re doing, but to get current about it. To understand what you’re doing so that you can make informed decisions. The biggest issue I find clients have is that money slips away when they’re not tracking it or paying attention.

Start to track what you’re spending. Doing it in Quicken, QuickBooks or Mint is great, but you can fold up a regular piece of paper in to sections and write down everything you spend for a week, one day/section at a time. When I say “write down everything” I mean everything including the $350 for the morning mocha, the money for lunch, the $10 you gave you kid and the money for the haircut not just your “regular expenses.” Because your life is not just regular expenses, it’s a whole multi-faceted host of stuff and you deserve credit for being a whole person.

After a month you’ll have a lot of information. Take a look. Are you proud of how you spent your money? Did you spend some of that money on savings? Did you get all the things you needed? Do you have “enough” money? Do your decisions reflect who you think you are? Are you in alignment with you values or is something not quite working?

If you’re totally on track – great! But chances are the reason you’re here reading this blog is because something isn’t quite working for you. In the next section will start to look at what that is exactly.

In Values-Based Accounting: Part Two – Determining Your Values, we’ll look at how to determine your core values. (Note that this next piece won’t be published until 7/27/11 so the link won’t work immediately.)

The IRS has information about this here. It has all kinds of information and audio about employment and tax law much of it actually understandable by normal humans.

And there’s another list in this .pdf file. The big deal is does this person have the right to direct and control the way he or she works, both as to the final result and as to the details of when, where, how, and in which sequence the work is to be done. In California the Employment Development Department or EDD will ask questions like:

*Did you have first call on this person’s time? (ie did you set their schedule)
*Could they work remotely? Or have their own computer/supplies/etc?
*Do you have to perform the services yourself?
*How long did this person work for you? (The longer it is, especially past 6 months, the less likely to be a contractor.)

You can call EDD or the IRS to get a determination. Both organizations will answer your questions and the iRS folks are pretty helpful.

There’s also been a trend to try to classify people as employees as much a possible so that they IRS gets paid. So if you have contractors – people who work for you for whom you are not paying payroll taxes – make sure to follow the rules. There are some places where the IRS rules are unclear, but this is not that place. And with EDD, at least in California, if they decide to audit this piece of your business, they can audit your employment history for everyone you’ve paid back to the first time this person worked for you.

That’s a pretty hefty load of paperwork if nothing else and the penalties frequently cause small and medium sized businesses to go under. So do your research to make sure you’re doing the right thing. Most small businesses I’ve seen tend to pay their people as contractors which is typically wrong especially for administrative support or people who have work on-site and to whom you give instructions.