This book has shifted how I feel about money, how I think about money, what I believe about money, how I pay attention to our money, and I am glad.
I have now joined Kate's online community and am getting emails from her. I want to keep shifting my beliefs and develop great habits with how I pay attention to my money – our money – and how we increase our money.
Reading Kate's book slowly was important for me because I had developed disempowering beliefs that I needed to shift into beliefs that empower me.
I love the way Kate uses humor and how she tells stories about how she go in – and then out of – credit card debt. Kate helps her readers learn from a combination of her own life lessons about money and the new ways she has of thinking about money now – after she began to change how she felt about money and creating new ways to think about it.
A love story with money – is it possible? In this book Kate Northrup takes us on a journey from where we are when we start reading.
(There is a money quiz in the first part of the book that helps you know where to start and what will help you change how you feel about money – by seeing your answers to the questions in the quiz.)
I love the titles of the chapters:
1. What's Love Got to Do with It?
2. It's Not About The Money
3. Woo-Woo Meets Cha-Ching
4. You've Got You Babe
5. What Can You Do to Pay Attention?
6. You Owe You
7. Feel-Good Financial Planning
8. True Financial Freedom
I love what Kate's mom, Dr. Christiane Northrup, says in the foreword to the book. I've included three quotes from her foreword to the book below:
"We all have a unique money legacy, of course. And talking openly and freely about money in families is not common. so it takes courage – and the willingness to look at, and change, your own consciousness about this subject."
"Here's the whole truth. Our relationship with money profoundly affects our health, particularly the health of the second chakra… For years and years as an ob/gyn physician I have seen up close and personal how a woman's health is affected by issues of money, sex, and power – second chakra energies."
"I love that my own daughter, was brought up knowing the link between beliefs and health, has looked her own money legacy straight in the eye – and then, with love and tenderness, changed the barren parts into an oasis of consciousness and practical wisdom. Through the eyes of my own child, I can see how very far I've come from financial terror to financial freedom."
The book is about our relationship with money – and the emotions that go with it and that is why Kate titled her book, "Money – A Love Story."
Kate says, "I'm sure some reading the title will be appalled that I had the nerve to use money and love in the same sentence. To even suggest that money is related to love has the power to offend. Yet I'm so sure that unraveling our money woes has everything to do with love (and very little to do with anything else) that I was willing to put it on the cover of this book."
"To wake up every morning and do whatever calls to you, whatever the heck you feel like doing, is connected to your ability to feel free from financial strain and be open to what your heart is telling you."
Doesn't that sound wonderful to you? It does to me!
Read this book with an open mind and heart. The way Kate talks about money combines the spiritual with the financial. I love that about her book.
Changing your reality with money requires listening to what Kate calls "the voices in your head." Why? Because as Kate says, "Our thoughts create our beliefs, which create our actions, which in turn create our reality." And as Kate says, those beliefs can, and do, come from anywhere.
"If we don't pay attention to the thoughts that are creating our beliefs, our actions, and ultimately our realities, we're not actually in charge of our lives. Instead we're letting some random reporter from the eleven o'clock news, or possibly even worse, our mothers or fathers run our lives."
In my work as a coach, I work with people on their beliefs. We all have beliefs we've picked up that help us and beliefs that hold us back or create problems we then must fix.
What do you believe about money? Do you believe it can be a love story for you?
Kate's mentor, Barbara Stanney, author of the book and course Overcoming Under Earning, says that our degree of resistance around money is proportional to the degree of power available to us on the other side of that resistance.
Kate's realizations on an airplane (in her journal) about self-love…"I've told so many people that the root of all problems is a lack of self-love, but it never occurred to me that my money challenges had anything to do with that and that taking care of myself in this way has nothing to do with deprivation or limitation but everything to do with self-love!"
Kate makes a great case for taking great care of your money as being a way of taking great care of yourself.
Valuing yourself is important and Kate suggests, in the book, to write three things you value about yourself each morning in your journal. I've been doing this since I read that part of Kate's book and I look forward to it each day. It feels good to look back through and read what I've written on previous day.
Each day I start with the words: "I have…" and then just write what I feel inspired to write that day. Kate says not to repeat yourself and I am surprised by how different the value lists are from day to day.
The thing they have in common is they help me feel good and remind me of things I have to value about myself.
Self-value + paying attention to your money + giving more value = receiving more value.
Paying Attention is something Kate insists we do. She's gotten me to set a reminder on my iPhone to so that at 11 AM daily I check all of our online bank accounts. Doing this every day keeps me aware of what we have, what we spend, what's come in, what we owe, and what's in our retirement accounts.
I am feeling more thankful than ever for the money we have and I feel great about paying more attention to the money we have and how we are choosing to use it.
Reading Kate's book has changed forever how I think about money in some powerful and empowering ways. I feel more love for the money we have, more thankful for what we have, and more appreciative of what are are able to do with our money.
I've created a green file folder, as per Kate's suggestion in her book, that says: "Invoices for Blessings Received"
I like this shift in thinking of the "bills" as invoices for blessings we receive.
Each time I put a "bill" in the green "Invoices for Blessings Received" folder it reminds me that it's for a blessing we've received or will during the next month for example our cell phones and the ability to make calls and send text messages; the lights, TV, heat, washer and dryer, stove, microwave we can enjoy using because PG&E provides electricity and gas for us to use each month.
Money – A Love Story. I love the idea of money being a love story. Learning from stories Kate tells about her own life, her mom's, and stories of other people she knows made it easy to remember the lessons.
I love to learn from OPE – Other People's Experiences. Money – A Love Story is just that – a way to learn from the experiences of other people.
Reading this book – cover to cover – took me a long time. But by reading it slowly I was able to gradually begin to shift my beliefs about money in some empowering ways.
Is money a love story for me now? I feel like it's starting to be.
I feel inspired to keep paying attention, make choices I feel proud of, and to keep becoming a better role model in regard to money for our son, my husband, and for all who are in my Circle of Influence as a life coach, author, speaker, and radio show host.
I am glad I chose to review this book and that I read all of it. I plan to read it again – slowly – and move closer to creating a love story with our money.
I would have like the cover to be more colorful or to look more like money – perhaps using gold for the word MONEY and the piggy bank and forest green for the subtitle text. Maybe the second printing could have a more attractive cover but what's in the book is what is most important.
I highly recommend this book!
To purchase a copy of Money – A Love Story, click on one of the following links:
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