If financial issues have taken over your life or damaged key relationships but you feel you are ready to make a change, Park Slope producers would like to hear your story. You should be willing to allow cameras to film a “day in your life,” including conversations with family and friends.  NYC area preferred.  If chosen for the documentary, a free consultation will be provided by Drs. Klontz.

If you feel you can benefit from the project, please contact info@parkslopeproductions.net

Why do some people take their roles as consumers literally and consume and consume and consume—purchasing items they don’t need, splurging on silly gifts (for friends and themselves) without pausing to consider costs, hitting the mall whenever they’re feeling down or bored, and digging themselves huge amounts of credit card debt in the process?

People aren’t that dumb. It’s pretty obvious that overspending leads to financial problems. It’s also pretty obvious that very few people actually need to go shopping when they say, “I need to go shopping.”

So why is it that so many consumers are unable to control their spending habits? How come they can’t approach shopping and other expenditures with detached logic? How come we all seem to buy way more than we need, and some of us pay the price in more ways than one? Why can’t we be more rational about consumption?

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Jacqui Payne wanted to be just like her friends, and credit cards were the means to get there.

“I had this impression that people who had credit cards were somebody, so I set out to have credit cards,” she said. “I always felt that I wanted my friends to see me as an equal. They had credit cards; I should have credit cards.”

There was one problem, Payne said: “They had the money to pay for them. I didn’t.”

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Has billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates or the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta done more for their fellow man?

If given an option between all the money or all the love in the world, which would you choose?

How you answer those questions will determine your financial future, according to Ted Klontz, a Tennessee-based financial behavioral consultant.

“For every financial behavior, there’s some kind of belief system that drives it,” Klontz explained.

“There’s what you think, and then there’s what you do,” he noted.

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Karina Carretero and Kian Kaeni, both 33, have known each other since he sat behind her in English class at their southern California high school in the mid-90s. They started dating in 2003 and married four years later. They have a 1-year-old daughter and are trying to save a down payment for a house.

That’s a tricky process, because they haven’t merged their finances yet. “Since dating and through marriage we kept everything separate,” says Carretero, a public relations executive. Although the couple slashed their student loan and credit card debt in anticipation of the home purchase, neither one has a precise tally of the bottom line.

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By Richard Sine

Step 1: Tune out the noise

You felt rich back in 2008, and now you feel poor. You’re not alone: As of late last year, nearly 80 percent of wealthy Americans had consciously reduced or deferred their spending, according to the American Affluence Research Center. Even the very rich are pinching 20s: About three out of four millionaires with up to $6 million of wealth are cutting back, and 56 percent of people worth more than that are doing the same.

But it’s your economy that matters, not your neighbor’s or even the nation’s. If your job is hanging by a thread or you’re drowning in debt, then it’s time to cut back. But if your job seems secure, your credit is good, and you have funds in the bank, then it may be time for some risks.

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Have you ever been in the middle of a stampede?

If you’re imagining thundering hooves stirring up clouds of dust, the answer will almost certainly be no. (Otherwise you wouldn’t be here to answer at all.) But the fact is, everyone who’s ever been a member of a group—in other words, each and every one of us—has undoubtedly been caught up in the human equivalent of a stampede. You may even have led one.

We’ve seen the thundering-hooves kind of stampede at the Black Hills Wild Horse Refuge outside Hot Springs, South Dakota. We’ve spent considerable time there watching the wild horses, their behavior and their interactions with each other. There always seems to be a leader or a group of leaders who determine what the group does—not through force, but simply by example. If the leaders suddenly begin galloping away, the entire herd goes with them. It doesn’t matter if they’re galloping because they’ve caught a whiff of mountain lion, or because they’ve stumbled into a hive of ground-nesting hornets, or because they’re just feeling in the mood for a good gallop—where the leader goes, so does the herd.

The lead horses might be taking the herd towards safety. They might also be leading it, by mistake, to the crumbling edge of a cliff. None of the other horses knows for sure. But all the horses are sure that they do not want to be left behind and they do not want to be the slowest. After all, to escape from a large predator, a horse doesn’t have to be the fastest in the herd. It just has to be faster than at least one other horse. To the members of a herd, being left behind means certain death—if not now, then soon.

A common belief is that all financial decisions are driven by greed. We disagree. We believe that all financial behaviors are driven by fear: that, like the horses in a stampede, our decisions about what direction to take, and the speed with which we take them, are driven by the fear of being left behind.

Humans are social animals. Our very survival for thousands of years depended on being a part of the tribe. Being kicked out meant being alone, and being alone meant death. Plus, we are wired to connect with others. Though this is an ancient instinct, one that evolved in our prehistoric past, it’s still one of the strongest impulses we have. MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, are just modern-day examples of the ancient herd instinct, and their success is testament to the power of that need to belong. That desire is not only still alive, but it is powerful, even though it typically operates below our immediate awareness. When activated, it will take charge and throw rationality out the window.

Think of the lead horse taking the entire herd over a cliff. This wasn’t a rational, conscious decision—it was an instinctual one. In humans, the herd mentality—the blind following of some de facto leader—can result in anything from riots, to gang violence, to bullying among children. Herd instinct can go out of control in the most unlikely of settings—as it did on Black Friday 2008, the day after Thanksgiving, when a temporary worker at a Long Island Walmart was knocked down and trampled to death by a “herd” of shoppers eager to snap up bargains.

The human herd mentality, too, applies to financial behaviors, and as such, can play an important role in shaping our money scripts. Many behaviors that seem to be random and irrational are, in fact, the result of a highly predictable social dynamic; our innate desire to “stay with the herd.” It is this desire that keeps us from breaking free of our “financial comfort zone,” or the socioeconomic herd in which we are most comfortable. Until we are willing to venture outside of our financial comfort zone, to leave our own herd and entering the territory of another, we will continue to unconsciously engage in financial behaviors that keep us stuck in, or draw us back to, our own.

Financial Comfort Zone

Picture the neighborhood you lived in the longest. You probably got to know it pretty well. You knew where to get groceries. You knew the quickest way to get to the hospital emergency room. You knew the friendly neighbors and the not-so-friendly ones. You knew where the closest hardware store was. Drug store. Coffee shop. Playground. Drycleaners. You knew your neighborhood. You felt comfortable there. You felt safe there. You belonged there.

A financial comfort zone works the same way. It’s the financial neighborhood that makes you feel safest and most at home. We often find ourselves in a particular financial comfort zone as a consequence of our birth and family-of-origin. We didn’t choose it originally, but many of us never realize how much a part of us it becomes. We can leave—but even if we do, the original boundaries we learned are very strong. Those boundaries may be arbitrary and drawn by others, but we soon learn to live within them anyway. Just as you learned not to throw a ball into the cranky neighbor’s yard, these financial boundaries set the parameters for where it’s acceptable for you to go and what it is acceptable for you to do with your money. They become second nature to us. They define our reality. Because they are automatic and lie outside our awareness, these financial boundaries, when unexamined, become glass ceilings and floors.

We see this phenomenon in multigenerational welfare recipients, professional athletes who come from poverty and, despite new-found riches, soon return there, and other sudden money recipients who turn their gold into dust. They are so comfortable with the expectations and the membership requirements of the social groups they grew up in, they will cling to the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of that group, even when their circumstances have changed. Some go so far as to lie, cheat, steal, and sacrifice relationships on the altar of the work-god, in a desperate attempt to stay in the neighborhood where they believe they belong.

Each financial neighborhood has its own set of values and mores. It has its own answers for questions like: What is the financial role of fathers and mothers? When if ever is it acceptable to take on debt? What is the best way to use my money? What are we supposed to put up with to meet our financial obligations to others (for instance, working at a job you don’t really like much)? How acceptable is it to flaunt how much I have, and what I spend it on?

Your financial comfort zone also dictates how “poor” and “rich” are defined (as we’ll see in a minute, these in fact are highly relative terms), and at what point you move from one position to the other. We know of one young lady from an upscale neighborhood who was planning her wedding. Her parents told her that they would give her a certain amount of money for her wedding, setting a limit to what they would be willing to contribute. Shocked, the young woman said, “A budget? Mother, that’s what poor people do!” Point is, the wealthy and the poor think very differently, and without a significant shift in thinking, it is difficult to move from one group to the other.

Our goal is to teach you to stretch your own financial comfort zone. We want to help you think and behave differently, so you can become comfortable at any financial level, and develop the mental and emotional framework you need to reach and maintain the financial level you aspire to.

Sports fans, both in tennis and soccer are being treated to spectacles of superhuman proportion. Whether in eleven hours of Wimbledon tennis between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, or in the pure grit and determination of the US Soccer team; we are treated to wonderful lessons of resiliency, determination and champion focus. The challenges were both mental and physical and brought out the best in all concerned; a testament to the best of the human spirit.

What separates us from these iconic examples is our own ability to tap into our own pools of mental toughness. Somehow, John Isner and his opponent, Nicolas Mahut refused to yield to the pressure and exhaustion and kept at each other game after game. After having goals disallowed in two matches where the calls by the referees were questionable, at best, the US team refused to allow the frustration to overtake their desire for success. It is that resiliency, in the face of challenge, that makes the achievement that much more wonderful to behold.

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Irritated by the noise, as I walked in front of the truck, I looked up at the guy, rough shaven, dirty ball cap, ripped T-Shirt, smoking what looked like a “funny” cigarette clenched conveniently between his gums in one of the several gaps provided by the few teeth that he had left in his head. He didn’t seem to notice me as I walked by, and appeared “Zombied” as if he was in some kind of trance, head nodding up and down and moving back and forth, foot long scraggly pony tail bobbing in rhythm to the head nods. With his hands he appeared to be playing an imaginary miniature drum set. All of the above was happening, I concluded, as a result of the leaves he was smoking combined with the music he was listening to.

In my mind, I began constructing an unauthorized brief biography as to what kind of person he was, what his value system was (poor), this level of consciousness (low), what kind of father he was (I assumed he was an absentee one), what kind of partner he would be (bad), his level of trustworthiness (low), his violence potential (high), all in the length of time it takes a web page to load.

Do I need to say that the above conclusions were not what could be characterized as gracious? Need I say that the judgments of him were less than complimentary? Need I say that I didn’t cut him much slack? Need I say that having run that mental rap sheet on him in about 6 seconds that I was even more irritated by his mere presence?

As I got in my car, having allowed him to have pretty much hi-jack the peaceful feelings I had going into the store, I firmly slid into my smug, holier-than-thou, self-righteous, judgmental pew (car seat). Suddenly everything went quiet. As I glanced at the hole in the noise, I saw the man get out of his truck. (He was probably going for his shotgun, because he was going to rob the store? Or decided that he wanted to shoot someone? Me? Had he somehow read my mind?)

With the biggest toothless friendliest smile that think I have ever seen on a human being he turned and began moving towards the back of his truck, obviously talking to someone. His buddy? His friend? His wife or child? A police officer coming to check him out?

No, none of those. As I watched in my rear view mirror, I saw him approach an elderly lady. As the scene unfolded it became apparent by the gesturing and talking that she had “lost” her car. (By this time I had rolled my window down to make sure that he wasn’t going to mug her). It seemed from what I could make out that she had been walking back and forth in the parking lot for several minutes. He had noticed her, (I hadn’t, because I was busy writing an opinion paper in my head, remember?) and asked her if she needed help. I saw him reach for her grocery sacks, while together they began walking, chatting, laughing, and apparently having a good time as they looked for her car. They eventually found it and actually finished off the adventure with a hug.

Thinking that the woman must have been someone he knew, I waited a minute or so until he got back to his truck and yelled out my window, “That was nice of y–did you know her?” He simply said, “Nope.” He then got in his truck and cranked the tunes.

I was embarrassed and chastened. See, while I was taking this guy’s inventory, he was noticing people around him who could use his help.

I wish I was evolved enough to have said, “Hey you know what I just caught myself doing?”

“You know what lesson I was reminded of?”

“You know what you just taught me, again?” I didn’t say anything. Out loud.

I did symbolically sit myself down and give myself a good talking to. It is hard to be reminded that part of me can still seize a moment. I guess I needed to be reminded that I am still capable of hurting others (and myself) with my judgments. Apparently, I needed to be reminded that while I am doing stuff like that in my mind I miss a lot of what is REALLY going on. Another AFGO. (Another Freakin Growth Opportunity).