hoarding money

I’m in love…

This is a long love letter, grab a cup of tea and settle in for a few minutes.

Yes, it’s true, I am experiencing the beauty of new love. It’s tender, and a wee bit frightening. I’m not quite ready to share the details, and it feels way too soon after my last relationship but, I’m a lover. It’s my nature.

The truth is, now that my heart is open, I walk around feeling in love most of the time. Not just with humans, but with all of Life.

And, I’ve fallen in love with each and every one of you who has written to share the truth of your current reality and your vision for the future.

My guess is that if you haven’t written in, that I’d fall in love with you too, if you did. (And, please do — I read everything and I become evermore inspired to keep sharing, even when it feels like a stretch for me to do so.)

Your stories of where you are now and what you want to create in your life are inspiring me to serve more widely than I ever have before.

Thank you for sharing them with me.

If you desire to work with me in the future, it’s a good idea to write in, whether you are ready to get started now or you know it will be some time in the future because it allows me to begin to get to know you, which allows us to dive in deeper more quickly and support you with more precision right away when we do work together.

I have three things for you today:

1. You are likely investing your resources in ways that will not lead you to more of what you want in life — now, there’s help.

I’m writing this on my way to San Francisco (now Oakland due to flight delays into SFO this am) for a 24-hour trip to support the launch of what I am calling the most rational book I’ve ever read on how we can invest our resources in the new economy for true safety.

I’m investing the time, money and energy to be in San Francisco for the launch because I know that the investment in tribe-building that comes along with my trip will be worth it — and that’s part of what you’ll come to understand creates real security, once you read the book.

I recorded an interview with the authors, Bryan Franklin and Michael Ellsberg. Here’s where you can hear it.

Read the book and change the way you think about how you are investing your resources, forever.

Check out my personal Facebook profile for some pictures from the day and the event itself.

2. How to become free to be all of yourself.

One of the questions I get asked the most by people who write in is — how did you go from being an uptight legal expert on TV to becoming free to be all of you?

Check out the live Facebook video I recorded this past weekend — on the process of becoming free to be all of yourself — here.

All I want to do lately is share what I’ve learned so you can build your life and income with your eyes and heart way more open than mine were.

3. The support for creating the life and income you really, really, really, REALLY want – not the one “they” want for you.

It’s SO easy to get sucked into creating a life and income you don’t actually want.

The pull toward safety, security and fitting in is strong for most of us, so we find ourselves making choices and decisions that lead to more of what we don’t actually want.

We follow the “leader” (monkey see, monkey do style) only to discover we’ve created a life that doesn’t feel right, dependent on an income that keeps us trapped in that life.

And the pressure to save, save, save so we can retire comfortably later.

Fahgeddabout that. It’s time to wake up.

Please stop waiting for later, and take a step toward getting the support you need to step into the life that’s waiting for you.

Watch the recording of my New Year’s Eve Clarity Call and you’ll hear about and from other people just like you who have done it, stepped into a life of freedom, liberated.

And you’ll learn how you can have my support in doing just that.

I’ve revamped my own income model for 2016 and I’m done with big launches of my products, don’t want this business to be a million dollar business, and I’m narrowing in on who and how I serve until I’ve freed up more time in my other business.

I promised myself last year that I was not going to go down the road of big launches, competition-based models, and enrolling as many people as possible in a short period of time.

It’s a “successful” model that leaves me wanting to quit the business every time. Not sustainable for me and my life. And while I’m fairly good at it, I’ve been committed to discovering a new way.

Yet, this fall I hired a “launch manager” to help me build out my systems so that anyone can sign up for our programs at any time, so I can just focus on creating great new content, and I could feel myself getting pulled into the old model that I had sworn to myself I was not going to get caught up in again.

It’s so alluring.

Blindly, again and again, I built my income model based on what others were doing “successfully” — but each time, I would get to the finish line and find I had created something I didn’t want, based on conditioning I couldn’t see.

This time, fortunately, I was awake enough to understand the road I was heading down wasn’t going to lead me to where I really wanted to go, and if I didn’t make a hard right, I’d be right back in the same place I had ended up in time and again.

So, at the 11th hour, I changed up the plan. I said no to the big launch, the affiliates, the million dollar business, and remembered what’s most important to me.

Rather than strategizing my webinar to maximize sales, I read everything you wrote the night before and stayed up until 3:30a (it’s when I often do my best work) and created a presentation that spoke directly to what you actually need.

If you haven’t watched yet, you can still do so here.

I made the decision not to enroll as many people as possible, but to limit the offer to a container of just 50 people right now. A container me and my team can handle and serve well and deeply. And we are already half full.

It’s enough. There’s no need to go bigger right now.

What matters isn’t how many people I can enroll, it’s how many people I can love. And right now, I’ve got  room for 50 in my inner circle attention field.

For so many years, my eyes were blind and my heart was closed.

Awakening these parts of myself has been both painful and ever so rewarding.

Coming into true alignment with the life I am here to live, and creating the space to live in my heart and share from the overflow could have been faster, if my own clarity had come sooner.

Of course, it couldn’t come any sooner than it did. We are each in the evolution process of discovering what’s true and that means someone has to take the long, circuitous route there.

I sense that I am in your life to ease the process for you. You are ready to see with clear eyes and to feel with an open heart.

You long for guidance as you step onto the road less traveled and I offer an outstretched hand with the other on my heart, welcoming you.

Welcome.  And thank you for being on the journey with me.

With so much love today and everyday.

Ali

PS — for you skimmers, here’s the three things:

1. Buy the book the Last Safe Investment and  start re-allocating your resources today. Here’s my FB message about it and an interview I recorded with the authors.

2. Check out the live video I made on Facebook: how you can become free to be all of yourself.

3. Watch the recording of the New Year’s Clarity Call before it comes down for good.

Does Hoarding Money Help or Hurt?

Meeting a money hoarder 5 years ago changed my life, for the better, thought it was a long road to liberation.

At the time, I was on the path to what I thought would bring me the financial freedom I was seeking, $40 million dollars was my magic number. When I had $40mm, then I would …

Oh, there were many stories of what I would do when I had $40mm in the bank generating 5% interest, throwing off the $2mm/year I thought I needed to be truly free.

Why $2 million? Because that’s what my companies were making (and spending) at the time and my thinking was — if I had enough in the bank to support those companies and my family without me having to work, I’d be golden. This thinking was flawed on so many levels that I can’t get into now, but I would have pursued this path had I not run into the man with a hundred million in the bank.

I thought for sure, this guy must be free, right?

Except he wasn’t.

In fact, he may have been the most “un-free” person I’d ever met. He was trapped by his millions.

All he could talk about was how much money he had and what forms of currency and banks he had it in. On top of that, he was still working like a madman to make more. And he really didn’t have any relationships of substance. He was hoarding money. It was a wake up call. I could see the path I was on clear as day. Bank accounts full of money and no real love or connection in my life.

What I realized by meeting him is that if I wasn’t free with $2mm of revenue coming into my companies, $40mm wasn’t going to do it either.

It’s up to us to liberate ourselves from the false thinking that has us trapped, not to earn more money expecting that to be the solution. Tweet It!

I had to find out what was on the other side of my belief that I needed to hoard all this money to be free.

So, I let it all go. I shrunk the companies. I moved to the farm. I stopped doing anything for money. I filed bankruptcy, rebuilt my life on a new foundation and discovered the path I now understand to be financial liberation — knowing you can earn what you need, when you need it, on demand, doing meaningful work in the world.

Hoarding money no longer became necessary from this place.

Today, I invest my excess in things that matter and make a difference — the well-being, care and education of myself and my family come first. The companies that support my work come second. Hiring people to address matters of consequence in our community, liked I did here come third:https://www.facebook.com/notes/ali-shanti/how-and-why-im-risking-it-all/739469412767280

If I have excess after all that (and I don’t currently), I’ll invest in land, water, energy, food and community.

I do see the benefit of having a cash reserve of some amount, which will differ for each person. For me, it’s quite small. Going to live on the farm with no back up allowed me to deepen my trust that I’ve got enough stored value in my services and the intellectual property I have created that, if necessary, I can rely on them to support me. But that’s not the case for everyone.

So, I’m curious — what is the minimum amount of money you would like to have on hand to back you up, if necessary? And then how are you using the excess to better the world around you? Leave a comment below to join the discussion.

Loveletter: Worst advice ever?

Recently, a guy tagged me on Twitter and said:

I totally get why he would say that. It’s certainly not what the mainstream financial advisers are teaching.

How can I possibly be teaching that people should stop worrying about paying off debt and saving for retirement?

Because I know that if most people follow the traditional personal finance advice they will likely not have what they actually need for the rest of their lives.

To ensure you can care for yourself and your family for the rest of your life, you need to learn how to give something of value in exchange for money in a sustainable way.

If you do not have enough in retirement now, will you ever if you continue to do what you’re doing now?

Probably not. If you died with debt, would it matter? No.

But if you learned to earn what you need, when you need it, on demand, doing meaningful work you enjoy, could that give you what you need to live the rest of your life and even pay off your debt in the future? Yes.

So why focus your life energy now on perpetuating a norm that likely isn’t working for you instead of creating a reality for yourself that gets you the liberation you are truly seeking?

Sure, it requires you to buck the trends and go against the traditional advice around money, retirement and debt, but that’s okay so long as it has you create the life you really want.

Want more?

Join us on Saturday, October 21st at 12:30pm ET / 9:30am PT for a live webinar. Register at www.moneymap.tv/webinar to get your seat.