The Copperjar System: Your Blueprint for Financial Fitness (US Edition). Alan MacDonald
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and don’t necessarily have to involve putting all your hard-won assets at risk.
•Chapter Seven shows you how to trim the fat from your expenditures, and asks you to carefully examine your spending patterns and make any changes needed to ensure that your spending habits accurately reflect the new goals and values you’ve established for yourself. This chapter is about making spending a question of choice, not compulsion. By the time you’ve worked your way through it, you should be well on your way to being in control and conscious of how and why you spend.
•Chapter Eight is about understanding your limits and knowing what’s achievable for you—and what isn’t. Some financial programs promise the moon and instil false expectations, setting people up for failure. This chapter will tell you exactly how to deal with your individual circumstances in the context of your own unique reality.
•Chapter Nine brings together the big picture and provides direct advice and guidance with respect to the preservation of wealth and protection of your assets. It will help you learn how to protect and preserve the wealth you’ve worked so hard to build, both for your lifetime and for your children’s.
•Chapter 10 wraps up all the advice offered in the book, and summarizes (in that long-promised checklist!) the essential things you need to remember. This chapter says it all ... again. After all, it’s your life. You own it, you can run it and enjoy it.
Let’s be clear about one thing: this book is not about getting rich. There are plenty of other “experts” out there who are all-too happy to tell you about their schemes for making a million bucks quickly and painlessly. You are quite free to listen to what they have to say. (Alan likes to quip that nobody ever “saves themselves rich.” That’s true, Paul says, but it’s also true that nobody ever stays rich if they spend ill advisedly).
But in our 50-plus years of collective experience helping ordinary people manage their money matters, we’ve seen over and over again that there’s simply no substitute for learning the basic lessons of finances. We believe that what’s most important for you, and for every adult—old or young, male or female, rich or poor—is knowing how to create and sustain the resources you need to live well, live within your means and stay solvent throughout your life.
Although our topic is a serious one, there’s no reason why it has to be boring. So we’ve tried to keep these chapters amusing as well as informative. That said, this certainly isn’t the kind of book that’s designed for light reading at bedtime or on the beach. It’s also not one you can likely read right through at a single sitting. Make no mistake: there’s a lot of hard work to be done here if you want to get the full value out of it.
But don’t let that discourage you. Again, it’s like an exercise program: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. If you take a leisurely walk rather than going for an hour-long jog, you’re still better off than somebody who stays at home on the couch. Similarly, if you can make your way through even the first chapter of this book, and it helps you refocus your financial priorities as a result of what you learn, then that’s a major achievement!
With that one step, you’ll be much further ahead in understanding your situation and making serious choices about how your financial life should be. The same goes for the rest of this book. Every chapter is designed to help you improve your financial knowledge and fitness.
Another aspect of the Copperjar System™ that we’re particularly proud of is its interactivity. Information is available not just in this book but also through our website, www.copperjarsystem.com. We’re trying to create a learning model that gives people a framework where they can learn how to handle and take ownership of their own financial affairs, in whatever way works best for them. It’s about you taking control over an aspect of your life that you may feel is controlling you. Every success stays a victory for you, but each setback is just another lesson to be learned—and built upon.
If you read this book and want to let us know what you think about it, good or bad, feel free to contact us via our website and let us know your thoughts. If you disagree with anything we say, let us know. If you think it’s great, we’re pleased to have that feedback too. And if you have stories of your own to share with us and with other readers, we’d love to hear them.
We’ve worked hard on the Copperjar System™, and we believe in it. By the time you’ve finished reading this book, we hope you will as well.
At the end of each chapter you will find a few exercises. The exercises are designed to get you moving towards your financial independence.
Sir Isaac Newton, the great 17th century physicist, postulated three laws of motion. The first stated that a body that is at rest tends to stay at rest, while a body in motion tends to stay in motion. The Copperjar SystemTM book is designed to get you into motion. Theory is nothing without practice, and we firmly believe that the exercises in the Copperjar SystemTM will start and keep you on your path to financial success. The exercises in this workbook are not designed to tell you what you must do. Our objective is to help you arrive at your own conclusions about your progress.
Everyone is different; your path and definition of financial fitness are probably different from ours. But one thing that all fitness has in common, whether you are training to be an Olympic skier, a concert violinist or a good gardener – is repetition. It’s tough to get in shape for anything if you don’t do the work.
One final note: we started to write this book just before the worldwide financial meltdown took place in 2008. At the same time that the markets were collapsing, Paul had to undergo heart bypass surgery. After his recovery, we considered whether we should proceed with the manuscript. After much deliberation, we decided that this book was even more relevant than ever. In fact, if anything, the meltdown in the markets demonstrated on an aggregate level what we had been talking about on an individual level for years.
The meltdown in the markets was a direct result of behaviours that collectively reflected exactly the types of issues that we have been addressing and will address throughout this book. The financial system was unfit. People had excess levels of debt, negative saving rates and wasteful consumer spending. The net result was that they were over- extended and unable to withstand substantial shocks and reverses in the market. Like some of the people whom we refer to in this book, they were making lots of money because they had to. They were over- leveraged, and they were making decisions based on the assumption that asset prices had no way to go but up.
Paul’s bypass operation was as shocking to him as the collapse of the markets was to the rest of us. Before the surgery, he was generally physically fit, with good exercise and eating habits. But he suddenly found himself faced with the prospect of a quadruple bypass.
The reason in Paul’s case was genetics. You might be tempted to translate that analogy to the argument that people are financially unfit as a result of their circumstances rather than their behaviour. While the circumstances in which we find ourselves are certainly important, we cannot overestimate the power of the choices we make and the actions we take to impact our lives for the worse or the better.
Paul’s doctors, for example, made it clear that if he had not been physically fit, he likely wouldn’t have survived to make it to the operating table. Paul’s fitness also greatly shortened his recovery period, making it possible for him to get back on the road to recovery that much sooner.
We strongly believe that this is also the case when it comes to financial fitness. Being financially fit in bad times will enable you to withstand the shocks more successfully, and allow you to rehabilitate your financial future more effectively.
This book has definitely been an adventure for both of us, in terms of the experiences we brought to it, the process of putting it all together during the market meltdown, and Paul’s cardiac surgery. The result has been both educational and entertaining. We hope you find that this book offers the same experience for you.
Alan MacDonald
Paul