Seven Stages Of Money Maturity

I'm reading the most amazing book. Seven Stages Of Money Maturity by George Kinder. I'll be blogging about it over the next few days. It makes you completely rethink your relationship to money, especially how you acquired those ideas from your family when you were a kid.

Compared to other personal finance books that offer specific financial steps and planning strategies, this book focuses on the search for spiritual meaning in wealth. Kinder, a certified financial planner and former tax accountant, focuses on three composite figures, based on real people, to illustrate the seven psychological stages people go through in their relationship to money: Innocence (not knowing anything), Pain (discovering that we need to work to earn money), Knowledge (of such skills as saving and investing), Understanding (more sophisticated emotional wisdom about greed and inequality), Vigor (energy to reach financial goals), Vision (directing vigor outward, perhaps to a community) and Aloha (altruism without expectation of gain of any kind). Kinder provides useful questionnaires in which he urges readers to reflect on various questions: What are your three earliest memories of money? Why and how did money first enter your relationship with your mother, your father? While readers comfortable with spiritual self-exploration may enjoy Kinders approach, they will still have to turn to more traditional personal finance books for nitty-gritty money advice.

-- Publisher's Weekly, Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

I took it out of the library -- part of a new game I'm playing with myself about NOT buying books. Books are costly, also books are cluttering up my house so totally, I'm trying to curb my habit to bring in more and more and more of them. I'm tripping over them.

Ironically, this book is probably more worth OWNING than about 100 other books I own. Still I like knowing the new library in town is there for my great borrowing pleasure and they are happy to house the books and I don't have to.