Читать книгу Negotiating Your Salary - Jack Chapman - Страница 17

One question I always ask in my seminars is, “Have you ever bought something you couldn’t afford?”

All in the audience pause, look blank for a moment, then break into nods and smiles while remembering the things that they “couldn’t afford” while buying. They pause because the left side of the brain, the logical side, knows it’s a contradiction in terms; you can’t buy something you can’t afford. If you do, it means that you really can afford it. But the right side of the brain, the visionary side, remembers the painful struggle, the exciting resolution, and the pleasure that had been gained from unaffordable purchases.

Do you own a house? Could you afford it when you bought it? Do you own a car? Could you afford it when you bought it? Think of anything really expensive that you’ve bought: a special vacation, for example. Before you decided to spend the money, did you think of yourself as someone who could afford that kind of thing?

How do people get to the point of buying something they can’t afford? Usually they progress from being curious to interested, intrigued, then wanting it, wanting it a lot, wondering how they can get it, thinking about it almost all the time, scheming, scrimping, saving, and finally buying it because they just can’t stand not having it any more! Then they wonder how they ever get along without it.

My term for this process is budget bending. During this process, as the urge to buy grows stronger, people make their money supply grow, too, by making it more flexible. We can divide its progressive flexibility into three stages that I call budget, fudgit, and judgit.

The first stage is familiar to everybody. No matter at what point a new desire creeps in, it’s met with money’s first line of defense, the budget.

Figure 3-1 . An in-creeping spending urge is met by money’s first line of defense: The Budget.

A budget is the way we hold on to the illusion that we are controlling our finances. In handling money, we all like to feel in charge. The easiest way to do that is to count how many dollars come in, divide them into little piles, and name one pile “rent,” another “food,” another “savings,” and so on. So at the end of the month, we’ve parceled out the income and transformed it into outgo and we’re at zero again. We feel in control.

Now, that’s not really controlling our finances. It’s like adding water to the soup until it’s thin enough to give everybody a cupful or like “steering” a canoe down rapids.

But it’s very comfortable to live within a budget structure. Living within one allows us not to afford things we’re scared of, cry “poor,” complain about the economy, and lead a simple, organized existence at the same time. That’s budget, or living within our means, the most rigid stage.

Although we might yearn to own a Mercedes, our budget won’t allow it; so we leave it until the day we win the lottery. But our next-door neighbor gets a Mercedes, and then his neighbor does. We find ourselves reading the Mercedes ads instead of the business section of Time. Our desire erodes our budgetary concern and slips us into fudgit, the financial status quo’s next defense.

In the fudgit stage we still think income is constant but are willing to shuffle the outgo to make room for new things.

“Maybe if I quit smoking, walk to work, buy my clothes on sale, and deduct the car’s principal and interest as business expenses, I, too, could buy a Mercedes.” The key word there is “maybe.” Purchases are rarely made in the fudgit stage. Since money is still not flexible, budget juggling doesn’t usually provide all the extra cash needed, but it gets us closer. Working through the fudgit stage gets us ready to take the plunge if the object goes on sale, or if we just can’t stand it any more.

However, the sure way to get from maybe to yes is to go through the judgit stage.

Say one day we casually ask our neighbor with the Mercedes how he can afford it. “Well, I’m in real estate,” he says, “so I shut down the office. Now I run my business out of my car; computer, fax, wireless internet, cell phone, files are all I the trunk; that way I save all that rent and other overhead.” (That’s fudgit.)

“But that doesn’t really cover it. The most important part is that when my clients see me in my Mercedes office on wheels, they are really impressed. My sales have jumped because people take me seriously, and referral business has improved since I’m almost always there to answer the phone.” (That’s judgit.)

Figure 3-2 . Shuffling the outgo of money to make room for new things: The Fudgit Stage.

Notice how the actual quantity of money available becomes flexible. The judgit stage takes an objective but creative look at the Mercedes and sees it not as a liability but as a money-making asset. Of course we can’t afford it now, but the only way ever to afford it is to buy it! So in the light of long-term thinking, we can be most expansive and flexible about the money. The same thing happens when we decide to spend $10,000 on a new, efficient heating system we “can’t afford.” It will pay for itself over the next three to five years. We’ll buy an item of superior quality now and save fuel and replacement costs later.