Endorphins

If you think you absolutely have no reason to exercise, I can give you one. Even if you're not overweight, even if you have tons of energy every day, even if your blood pressure is so low your doctor has to dig a hole to chart it, there's still one good reason to exercise.

Endorphins.

Endorphins are a feel-good chemical your body distributes in response to stress or pain. Think of them as like morphine, only instead of your doctor injecting from the outside, your body is producing it from the inside. Any time you have a painful experience, or a stressful one, your body reacts by producing endorphins.

The endorphin reaction is two fold. First, a rush of endorphins are produced to deal with the initial pain. If you are suddenly placed into a stressful situation or experience a sudden pain, your body produces endorphins to try to deal with that situation.

Second, after the experience is over, your body starts to hold itself at a higher endorphin level, because it knows such an event might happen again. In other words, we come away feeling better and having a higher threshold for pain.

Just about anything you're passionate about or enjoy doing can probably be linked to endorphins. If you like roller coasters, it is largely because you enjoy that rush of good feelings you get from having been through that traumatic experience. What we've always called an "adrenaline rush" is actually more of an "endorphin rush."

Sci-Fi author Dave Wolverton has made a good case that the same thing happens when we watch a sporting event or read a book or watch a movie. Our body reacts as if we were involved in the situation (which, in a way, we are) and produces endorphins to react to the stress.

Whatever way we first discovered we could get this "rush," is the way we'll probably keep coming back to. People who read books or watch sports or do competitive activities are all looking for the same thing--a certain degree of stress, and the endorphin rush that comes with it. Even people who are addicted to gambling, in the end, aren't really in it for money. If they were, they'd have given up when they didn't get any. They crave that feeling they get when there's the possibility of all that money against the risk of losing it all.

Exercise is a way to do that every day. You put your body through enough stress to start producing those endorphins. It's not meant to wipe you out to the point you can't function--you just exercise to the point where you know your body's worked a bit harder than its accustomed to.

Then, endorphins kick in to deal with the stress. You feel better about yourself and about life. Problems seem easier to face and goals seem more achievable.

And even after the initial "rush" wears off, you're left with a higher baseline for pain and stress than you had before. Something that would have been a big deal before you started seems easier to handle after a few months of consistent training.

It's obviously not the only way to produce endorphins. There are ways like the ones I've suggested above. I also heard from Dr. Benjamin Martinez, a behavioral expert, that smiling produces endorphins, and that studies have shown that it works just as well even if the smile isn't sincere. In other words, smiling alone can sometimes help you feel better.

So go ahead. Become an endorphin pusher.

Fixed At Last

Well, tonight, just one day shy of a week since the night it was smashed, my window is now fixed again, and my car sits waiting for something to be damaged again.

I just I'd post that so whoever keeps doing it would know that it's your turn again.

I'm sorry it took me so long. You know how tough it is to find time for these things.

Boys And Girls Are Different

Ladies, have you ever dieted with your husband, only to become discouraged as the pounds seem to fall off him like rainwater, while the scale didn't budge for you?

Or, even worse: Men, have you ever felt like your wife wasn't trying as hard as you, because you were seeing solid results and she didn't seem to be?

Well, I have news for the both of you. Boys and girls are different.

In the case of weight loss, this works in the boys' favor.

How much weight you lose is a factor of four things:

1. How much you eat.
2. How much you already weigh.
3. How much muscle you have.
4. How much work you do.

In every one of these categories, guys have the advantage.

1. A guy can eat more than a girl, and still lose weight. Depending on how much taller the guy is and how much he weighs, he can eat a lot more. In the case of me and my wife, I can eat around twice as many calories a day as her (me: 2,500 her: 1,2000) and still lose weight.

2. When you weigh a lot, your body has to burn more calories just to keep your body going--to maintain all those "parts." You might think of it as a self-regulatory system for the body. When it gets bigger, it tries to burn more calories to get itself smaller again. Since guys, on average, weigh more than girls do, this actually works to their advantage for weight loss.

3. Guys have more muscle than girls. Again, just a biological fact. If neither of you has seen the inside of a gym since high school, the guy's body will have retained more muscle than the girl's. Since the body has to burn calories to maintain that muscle, the guy will be burning more calories even if he's just sitting around watching TV. Even if you've both been lifting every day, the guy will still have more muscle than the girl, because his body is made to hold more muscle.

4. Guess what guys? If you ran a mile and your wife ran a mile, since you're bigger, taller, and you weigh more, you had to do more work to move your body that mile than she did. Granted, since you have more muscle, you and she may have worked at exactly the same intensity, but it took more energy, and ergo more calories, for you to do it than for her. In other words, you can lose more weight giving exactly the same effort as her.

So ladies, don't get discouraged, and guys, don't get a big head. It's not you. It's not fair. It's biology.

So ladies, go out there and show biology who's boss.

Why You Don't Want A Tax Return

So, now that January's over you have a W-2 and you're busy trying to figure out the best way to get that money away from the government and into your own hands.

You start hearing things like, "Oh, my sister's brother-in-law has an uncle who's going to do it for me," or "My daughter's friend is studying to be a CPA, so I think I'll ask her."

I'm sure everybody who majored in anything close to math dreads this time of year, because they get W-2's shoved at them from every angle from people with puppy-dog eyes and pleas like, "I really need to get $2,000, so I can use it as a down payment on a car."

You want to get money back from the government every year, right? As big a check as you can, right?

Sorry, friends, but no you don't.

You really don't.

You don't want Uncle Sam to give you back one thin dime.

Shift your mental gears for a moment. Imagine a friend of yours comes up to you and hands you two thousand dollars, cash. "Here you go," he or she says. "Take it with my blessing."

"Wow," you say, because although your friend can be helpful, you didn't think they had this kind of money. In fact, they're usually broke, so them having extra to give you makes no sense. You say the only thing you can think of: "Thank you!"

"Don't mention it," they say. "It's actually your money. I've just been taking it here and there where I could, and I thought you could use it back, now."

Would you be grateful to that friend any more? Would the two thousand dollars seem like a very generous gift?

Or would you want to blurt out something like, "You idiot! I could have been using that money all this time to pay down this high interest debt that I have! How long have you had this?"

"Oh, about a year."

"A year? I have debt that costs me 25% interest! You taking this two thousand dollars cost me five hundred bucks!"

Or, if you don't have debt, "I could have put this in my mutual fund and earned two hundred and sixty bucks!"

Or, if you think saving and paying off debt are a waste of time, "I could have blown this on DVDs and pizza!"

The point is, someone else using your money for a year isn't a great proposition. Yet we keep doing it, year after year, when we have too much withheld from our taxes.

Why do we do this? I think there are a few reasons.

1. We actually think we're saving money.

If we're putting money somewhere that we can't get to it for a while, that's a form of saving, right? So if I have extra taxes withheld, I'm giving money to the Government I won't get back until the end of the year. It's like a forced savings plan, isn't it?

No. To borrow an analogy from Robert Allen, a dollar is like a seed. If you plant it in the right place, it will grow. Saving and investing consist of putting the dollars in one of those places. If you want to save your money for a year, your banker will be more than happy to take it away from you for any period of time you would like--they call it a Certificate of Deposit, or "CD" for short. Unlike Uncle Sam, they'll give you some interest on your money.

2. We don't want to run the risk of having to pay.

I'm one of these. While I don't love the prospect of letting Uncle Sam have an interest free loan for a year, it does sound more appealing than having to pay him when the year is up. I have enough debt already. Do I really want to add the Federal Government to the list?

Really, paying back money to Washington isn't as bad as you think. It's almost like the above scenario, turned upside down. You get to be the friend who comes back at the end of the year and says, "Oops. I think this is yours." You get to be the friend who gets the free loan.

In fact, why not use that paranoia you have that the Men In Black will come and haul you away as a motivation to start really saving something? If you think your deductions came down by too much, take that amount and put it in a savings account every month, or a money market account, or somewhere that it will earn you something. Every time you're tempted to grab it, just picture Tommy Lee Jones getting out of a black Mercury in front of your house with a ray gun.

At the end of the year, if the government does want money, you're covered and you still have the interest to play with. And if they don't want it, you're golden--that money is yours now, free and clear.

I'm not suggesting you increase your withholdings above what really belongs to the government. The ideal scenario is that you pay them a couple of hundred dollars, or you pay them a couple of hundred dollars. But if you're getting back checks with four or five digits to the left of the decimal point, and you're excited about it--

Well, I've got a deal for you. Why don't you just sign that check over to me? I promise to give you back the same amount in a year, and you can get just as excited about it all over again.

Or doesn't that sound like a good deal to you, when you really think about it?

31 days down, 334 to go -- One Month

Well, I'm 1/12th of the way through this thing. I'm more than on track to lose all my weight, and way behind on my efforts to get out of debt. Not that I expected to be any farther on the debt by now, but it hasn't come down by 1/12th, so I'm technically behind. Although the good news is my tax return should even things up.

It is going to be enough to nearly pay off this fine laptop I'm computing on. Since that's the highest interest debt I have, that will be a very good thing.

Something like 30 bucks of the 40 bucks a month minimum payment was going to interest--meaning the "loan" was only going down by 10 bucks a month, despite the fact that the machine itself probably depreciated 1,000 the second it left the factory and came to me.

I read this week that more and more businesses are starting to operate this way. Sears credit is the highest money-making part of the Sears company. No longer does Sears sell tools, now they finance "stuff." Ford's the same way--they keep on making cars so their finance department will have something to finance.

They're all getting rich off the fact that you and I are willing to pay many, many times more for an item than the tag says, as long as they stretch those payments out to make it as painless as possible.

Once that's paid off, I will never finance a household product again.

Unexpected Expenses

Well, 1/3 of the $300 is now officially spoken for.

I walked out to my car yesterday morning to find my car window had been smashed in.

Again.

This time it was the driver's side. "Daddy's window," as my girls call it. It was still near enough to last time that I hadn't gotten out of the habit of emptying the car when I got out, so they got nothing.

Okay, maybe they got something--I didn't actually count the hot sauce packets in the glove box--but they didn't get anything of note.

A year ago, I don't know what I would have done in this scenario. With rent taking nearly every dollar of tommorrow's paycheck, I'd probably have tacked another chunk of change on one of the credit cards, which I may have just paid down to under the limit. Once the interest hit, I'd have been over my limit, and they'd have hit me with over limit fees. Then I'd pay it down in February until that monthly expense came up.

As it is, I'm glad I had the money there.

But I'll tell you--this is going to be a long year if every time I get a little ahead somebody breaks something.

Sunday Book Review: Rich Dad, Poor Dad

There are two ways to build wealth. The way I've been talking about, the Dave Ramsey way, the Millionaire Next Door way, is to get rich on equity. In other words, with money you actually have.

The other way is to use leverage. In other words, become wealthy by going into debt. I'm sure that doesn't make sense to anybody--when's the last time you knew somebody who had made tons of money off Visa?

The trick is learning the difference between good debt and bad debt. Leverage is, in theory, "good debt." The best way to define good debt is "debt that pays for itself."

In this book, Kiyosaki does a good job of changing the way we define the terms "asset" and "liability." Traditionally, an accountant would say an "asset" was something you owned that had value. A "liability" was something to which we owed money.

Kiyosaki's very valid argument is that, by this definition, we categorize a lot of things as "assets" that don't help us financially. Is that boat in the driveway really an asset? Or is it costing you loan payments, gas, and repairs?

This book calls for a new definition of these terms. An asset is something that puts money in your pocket. A liability is something that takes money away from you. If you were to lose your job today, would this item bring you money, or drain money? That's how to tell if it's an asset or liability.

Instead of "Net Worth," Kiyosaki talks about "Cash Flow." His definition of wealth is whether you have enough money flowing in each month from assets to pay all your expenses, even if you quit working today. If you do, you're wealthy. Regardless of whether that's $1,000 a month or $100,000 a month, if it covers your expenses you're wealthy and free to do whatever you want--work or otherwise.

So good debt would be invested in an asset that pays for itself and puts money in your pocket. If you buy a coin-op car wash and the payments on the loan are $1,200 a month but the car wash makes you $1,500, you now have $300 in positive "cash flow." You've harnessed the power of that much-mentioned "OPM"--Other People's Money.

Can this work? You bet. There are dozens of people who can prove it. A lot of your "flashy" millionaires are this way. Trump's leveraged up to his hairpiece. I'm sure that's why he files bankruptcy week after week after week.

And while we all sit back, feeling smug to watch him making and losing fortunes over and over, you notice he still gets to have the big house, the big plane, and the fancy weddings no matter how many times he does it. There are advantages to leveraging.

But books like this always contain caveats. "Don't buy the first house you find!" "You'll have to put a lot of effort into finding the deals." "I shop for deals on homes the way your Mom used to shop for deals on groceries."

In other words, they have to put as much time, effort, and energy into this as you're already putting into your full-time job.

Operating leveraged isn't easy. It's very, very risky. If you find yourself in a money-losing investment, you're going to have to come up with that difference yourself, and even if you manage to bail out on it, it will often be at a loss since it proved to be worth less than you thought.

And there are plenty of not-so-flashy equity millionaires. Bill Gates is an equity billionaire. Microsoft, for all the problems people have with them, runs debt free.

I absolutely believe in the "Cash Flow" principles taught in this book. We need to learn to buy things that make us money instead of buying things that cost us more money. Your money can undoubtedly work harder than you can.

However, I still maintain the risk involved in leveraging is only worthwhile when you can afford to take it.