After finishing the Mallorean, Tatjana and I started reading The Courage to be Rich. The book is about what it takes to become rich, both financially and emotionally. We are at chapter 6 or so, and so far, the book has been getting better as we read along.
The starting chapters where only so-so to me, with a few stories about people with destructive spending habits that were traced back to traumatic childhood experiences. Then it went on about Positive Thinking. Neither of those things apply to me personally, because I can't find any traumatic money-related childhood experiences in my life, and I'm quite skeptical with regard to Positive Thinking. I think it was Stephen Covey who said it, and I quite agree, that a lot of Positive Thinking is done at the surface: you tell yourself to think positively, and if you repeat it long enough, you will believe that you believe the message. I feel that only if the change of thinking is done at a level deep within yourself, you will genuinely change.
I decided to continue reading with the book, and I am happy with that decision. A lot of what I read so far maps to Stephen Covey's first habit: Excercise your right to choose. I have the freedom to choose how I think about my money, my debts, my spending habits. I have the freedom to choose to be ashamed of my financial situation (in which case I probably won't have the courage to deal with it properly), or to choose to accept it as it is and act accordingly.
We got as far as the chapter about credit card debts yesterday. That part, fortunately, is not relevant to either Tatjana or me, because we do not have such debts. We limit the use of credit cards to those things that are impractical to pay by other means: online orders placed in the USA, for example. Amazon.de offers the possibility to pay by bank account withdrawal, by the way: the money is taken from my account as soon as the item ships which has the benefit of me not having money on my account that I do not own.
For the record: the only debt I have is the credit I took to finance my appartment. Not that I need external judgement, but according to The Courage to be Rich, this kind of debt is a Good Debt. The financial problem I do have, is a tendency to spend a little more than I earn. Not much, but over times this means that my reserves are steadily dropping. I want to put a stop to that, which I way I agreed to read the book with Tatjana.