wild money blog

…while exploring our relationship with money!

I’m writing a book called Wild Money: A Right-Brained, Knock-Your-Socks-Off Approach to Loving Your Relationship with Money (working title). After looking high and low for books on personal finance written for non-linear creative people, I finally realized I’d have to do it myself. I want to create a book filled with the artwork of “creatives” from around the world.

Want to play?

Anyone can participate. There is no prerequisite other than desire. I envision a community sharing our insights and attitudes; histories and dreams of how money has woven through our lives; tales of helping, healing, hurting, reconnecting, disconnecting, saving, destroying and otherwise wildly impacting our tender, brilliant, expressive selves.

I have a short time frame for this project, so I’ll need all artwork by Dec 15, 2010. If you are willing and able to share your art (and maybe some writing if you’re so inclined), please click here for more information.

I’ve only just begun to explore the vast communities on the web and need some help linking-in. So I’d appreciate your passing this on to as many people, lists, groups and social media feeds as possible.

Thank you in advance!

Luna Jaffe, CFP

Lunaria Financial, LTD

7837 SW Capitol Highway, Suite C, Portland, OR  97219

503-452-7000

Securities offered through KMS Financial Services, Inc.

© 2011 Luna Jaffe

An invitation to artists and creatives to submit artwork for possible use in the upcoming book, Wild Money

Timeframe

Submissions will be accepted no later than December 15, 2010.

Process

1. Send an email to wildmoneyart@gmail.com by December 1, 2010, if you’d like to participate. Please let me know if you’d like to do more than one illustration.

2. You‘ll receive an email by December 2, with further instructions, requesting you to illustrate a chapter title, do one of the exercises in the book and/or write about what you created. Assignments will be random and some will have multiple artists working on them.

3. Artists will have 2 weeks to create their artwork. Submissions will be accepted no later than Dec 15, 2010.

4. Although I will try to include all artwork, this is not guaranteed. While the author and publisher will have the final say on which artwork and essays to print, submissions will be published on the Wild Money Blog and artists will be fully credited.

5. Everyone who participates will be acknowledged in the book. If your art is used, additional information such as your website and email address, will be included if you desire.

Technical Information

Please use 7 ½ by 10 ½ for your images. Include the words if you are illustrating a chapter title. If you are working digitally or scanning please design at 300 dpi. Please be certain to have permission for using any images or backgrounds in your creations. It is the responsibility of the artist to ensure they have publication permissions for any materials used.

Permissions

Each artist must complete and mail back the permissions letter on the following page following
submission of their artwork.

Background

I am writing Wild Money specifically for the creative community. It’s time someone stepped forward with a compellingly beautiful book to help creatives befriend their money honey and build financial competence without being bored to tears. I plan to design the book and then present it, fully formed, to specific publishers.

Money has long been a difficult topic avoided by artists, performers, writers, and other right-brainers. I know because I am, first and foremost, an artist and writer. For over 12 years I was the president of Lunasilks (www.lunajaffe.com), my own wearable art company. I specialized in creating ceremonial garments, though I also had fun creating elaborate hand-painted felted wool coats with my dear friend Sarah Lee.

After my father’s sudden death when I was in my early thirties, I decided it was time to broaden my skills, and enrolled in a master’s degree at Pacifica Graduate Institute. My art became more personal as I dove into depth psychology and became a psychotherapist. I stopped selling my work and closed my company to focus on my practice, while continuing to explore art through visual journaling. During this time I continued to teach process oriented art classes.

In my late thirties, rocked by a horrific divorce and a burning desire for motherhood, I found myself searching for a new direction, a career that would help me to build skills in areas I felt were weak. When a woman I met at a business expo suggested I consider becoming a financial advisor, I laughed out loud, and giggled all the way home. When I told my partner, she also laughed and said, “Perfect, a job for the one who hates to balance the checkbook!” Imagine her surprise I was actually hired by one of the nation’s largest brokerages!

Fast-forward eight years. I am now a Certified Financial Planner and I’ve recently opened a firm called Lunaria Financial where I focus specifically on the needs of creative people with sudden or significant money. I teach classes on the concepts from my upcoming book, and I love to explore creative ways to reinvent a positive relationship with money.

Luna Jaffe, CFP

Lunaria Financial, LTD

7837 SW Capitol Highway, Suite C

Portland, OR 97219

503.452.7000

Securities offered through KMS Financial Services, Inc.

© 2011 Luna Jaffe

I spent the weekend at a retreat called Walking Into Fire with three of my favorite teachers: Jennifer Louden, Susan Piver and Patti Digh.

Telling it like it is

Although this was a writing retreat, I found it easy to translate the exercises they shared into processes to help dig into our relationship with money. Here is one exercise Patti taught called ‘Yes, But.‘

Have you ever experienced being stopped dead in your creative tracks by someone responding to your fabulous, world changing idea (or your heart ache) with ‘Yes, but….‘?

It might look something like this. You are having coffee with a dear friend, and the conversation has turned to your job hunting process:

‘Well, I’ve been scouring ads on craigslist and Monster, I’m not making any headway.  So I’m thinking about going back to school and changing careers altogether.‘

‘Yes, but you know that takes money and how will you pay the bills? You have a child, you know.’

‘Yes, but I might be able to get a scholarship, and I’ve heard they have childcare.’

‘Yes, but you’ll be in debt, and I know how you hate owing people money, and what if there aren’t any jobs in that field when you graduate? Then what?’

You get the picture. ‘Yes, but…’ kills the conversation, kills possibility, kills creative problem solving.

This also shows up at home with our partners and children, and at work or business with our bosses and employees, as the tendency to say no… not because the real answer is no, but because we don’t trust the process. We don’t trust that playing with ideas is different from agreeing to buy the new car or do the $100k addition to the house.  ‘No‘ and ‘Yes, but’ are both ways of buying time, and stalling the creative process, and most of the time it’s not conscious.

I’m here to tell you that there’s a tremendous difference between talking with someone who continually closes the door on your ideas, and someone who opens the door with an invitation to explore, to step into the preposterous, the land of ridiculous possibilities.

What happens if we simply change one word, and make it into ‘Yes, and…‘?

‘I’m not sure what to do… I’ve been unemployed for five months. I’m losing faith.  I’m thinking about going back to school.’

‘Yes, and maybe while you are there you’ll meet someone that turns out to be your next boss!’

‘Yes, and I might find what I’m really passionate about, since working in a proctologist’s office clearly isn’t it. Heck, I might as well apply to med school with all that I learned working in the field.’

‘Yes, and you could also do career counseling to explore all the options. You could even create an independent study class with the sole purpose to evaluate your passions and skills and see what jobs combine both.’

‘Yes, and while I’m going to school I could work at Starbucks because they have great benefits, and I could conduct research as I interact with my customers.’

‘Yes, and you then discover there’s a link between the coffee you drink and the jobs you excel at, and you publish a best selling book about it.’

You see?  ‘And‘ is an invitation to go exploring.  ‘But’ is a judgment that stops you in your tracks, hijacking the creative process.

We ‘yes, but‘ ourselves all the time, and we do it to those we love, believing it’s our job to protect them from themselves or from the big, bad world. We also ‘yes, but‘ because we are afraid of change, we are afraid of the unknown, we are afraid of getting what we want.

Today I invite you to have a conversation with yourself about something you want. Maybe you want to ask for a raise, or you want to start saving for your doctorate and your spouse doesn’t see the point.  Maybe you have been thinking about hiring a financial adviser, or starting a Roth IRA.  Write the conversation just as I did above. Respond to everything with ‘yes, but’ until you are so frustrated you want to pull your hair out (Okay, stop before any locks land on the floor). Then do the same with ‘Yes, and.’ Let yourself go into the possibilities, as wacky as they may sound.

We didn’t get electricity, microwave ovens, the iPod and YouTube because people said ‘Yes, but.’ Let me know what you discover!

© 2011 Luna Jaffe

Brokerage statements-you know what I’m talking about-the big envelopes that are easier to stuff into a file than open and carefully read. Especially during the past few years…why bother, right? Well even if you don’t plan to change things and you are comfortable with how your money is invested, no one has a greater interest in your investments than yourself. My hunch is that if you knew what to look for and could quickly assess the statement, you would. So I’ll help you decode them and bring a bit of fun into the process.

First I want to tell you that you are not missing a gene, nor are you defective in any other way. Financial statements were designed by left-brained people for left-brained people. The layout and lack of color and imagination challenge those of us who draw outside the lines, and prefer listening to a story over reading a graph full of financial statistics. That doesn’t mean you should abandon your financial adviser or bury your financial statements under a rock in the back yard. Reading these financial statements is something you can learn by following some simple steps.

What do you want to know?

Some of my clients like to track every deposit and withdrawal in their account while others only want to know how their portfolio is doing compared with the rest of the world. (We use benchmarks like the Dow Jones, NASDAQ, MSCI and Lehman Bond Index to indicate averages for different markets.)

If you’re not getting the information on your financial statement in the way you need it, learning to look for the information you want will help. At the very least, look for the following things:

• Current account value
• Last month and last year’s account values
• Activity (money flowing into and out of your account)

If paper and pencil are soothing to you, take a sheet and make yourself a little chart to fill in each month—just like taking notes in school. The fact that you are physically doing something with the data will help it stick in your mind. Do this every month so you can notice the trends.

Turn on some music you love and open your brokerage statement with a highlighter in hand

I use Pandora on my iPhone and pink or purple pens to make it fun and not like work or school. I write the name of each account on the financial statement if it’s not easily found—Luna’s Roth, Toni’s Roth, Hunter’s Custodial, etc. This makes it less confusing when you’re looking at the numbers. Or have fun and use a sticker-a heart for Luna’s Roth, a star for Hunter’s account. The more you make this fun, the easier it will be.

Now highlight the current account balance. Most financial statements are organized so that the first page is the big picture, and the following pages are the details of the activity in the account: money coming in (deposits, dividends, fees paid, interest, proceeds from securities sold), money taken out (withdrawals, fees, purchases and reinvestment). It’s a good habit to scan the activity section so that you become familiar with normal activity, and therefore can spot something out of the ordinary.

Are you rolling your eyes yet? This really takes less than five minutes, once a month. Afterwards give yourself a treat that you only get when you accomplish this task. Love spicy chocolate? Almond Roca ice cream? Reading a juicy blog? Then save that special treat for your once a month statement-reading ritual, and suddenly you will find it’s not so bad.

What to do with that brokerage statement?

Now that you’ve read the statement, decide if you need to keep it and if so, for how long. My rule of thumb is this: keep six months worth of financial statements from all accounts-401k, brokerage, bank, credit card, etc.—unless they are connected to a business you own, in which case you will want to keep them longer (7 years for taxable accounts, for example).

If you own stocks/bonds/mutual funds in a non-retirement account (a jointly held, individual, trust or custodial account) then hold on to your trade confirmations, since this is how you establish your cost basis, which is important when you sell something and need to report your tax gain/loss to the IRS. It’s far easier to keep your trade confirmations for years, than all those statements.

Are you receiving statements online? The best way to manage this is to download the PDF file and keep a folder on your desktop entitled “ABC Statements 2009-2010.” Make it a habit to download this information once a month for review. But don’t make the mistake of never looking at your statements, because you could easily miss a mistake.

Use these steps to befriend your statements! Treat them like cozy friends that love to keep you up-to-date and you’ll soon break through barriers to money mastery!

© 2011 Luna Jaffe

Formal or informal, we all have our support system, the go-to folks, the advisers who catch the brilliant ideas we lob or talk us down when we approach a ledge. I have my own team of professional experts—a banker, a lawyer, an accountant, a business coach, and a marketing wiz. They are all individuals I know and trust because, over time, they have proven their integrity and wisdom.

In the world of personal finance, there are many types of advisers-money therapists, money coaches, financial planners, investment advisers and registered representatives. Each serves a unique purpose, and some individuals have multiple skills. I know a money therapist, for example, who was a financial adviser for over 10 years. I was a psychotherapist and am now a financial planner. As we evolve in our careers we use garnered skills to inform our chosen field. This is a huge benefit and should be something you look for when considering which advisor is right for you.

There are times when you simply need a sales person to present the facts and help you choose between an array of financial products. In other situations having a therapist or financial planner is absolutely the way to go. I’ve put together the following guide to help you decide exactly who your ideal financial team members might be:

Money Therapist

A money therapist will typically hold a master’s degree in psychology or social work, with extra training in working specifically on money related issues. She will have an understanding of the interaction between various psychological disorders and money. For example, if a person has obsessive-compulsive disorder, it’s far more effective to address the disorder first through therapy and perhaps medication, and then address issues related to money management. Financial Therapy is a new field of specialization and is quickly growing in popularity. Here in Portland, Oregon, we are fortunate to have Brian Farr, MA, a money therapist who used to be a bond trader. There are others like him around the country.

Money Coach

As a trained professional, a money coach may or may not have a master’s degree or coaching certifications. It is, however, important to understand their background and credibility. Some were financial advisors who found they loved coaching more than managing money. Others are naturally good with money and love to share what they know. Work with a money coach when you want help understanding your behavior around money, or you need someone to hold you accountable to various tasks you are trying to master. Check out the Money Coaching Institute and my favorite money coach, Shell Tain.

Financial Planner

A Certified Financial Planner™(CFP) has skills that are both broad and deep, including the expertise to address tax, legal and estate issues as they relate to your personal and business finances. To become a CFP, a person must earn a bachelor’s degree, log three years experience advising clients, pass a rigorous two-day board examination and maintain a clean record with both the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and Securities and Exchange Commission (FINRA/SEC). In addition there are steep continuing education requirements.. CFPs are as varied as any profession; so look for someone who works with both your money and your emotions. After all, you need to feel safe enough to voice your fears, expectations, hopes and dreams.

Investment Adviser/Registered Rep

Investment advisers, sometimes known as registered representatives, are professionals who have securities licenses and/or are registered investment advisors within their state. Depending on their level of experience, they may be an excellent source of information and fantastic to work with. As with any professional service, financial advisors of all types can be invaluable confidants or they can be grossly misinformed and suggest investments and solutions that have long lasting negative ramifications on their clients’ portfolios. Always check backgrounds and references thoroughly and trust your gut when interviewing candidates for your financial team. Ask how they are paid for the services provided, what fees are associated with opening and closing accounts, and check them out on the internet before signing on the dotted line.

It’s up to you!

You may choose to work with just one financial professional at a time, or have your financial planner and money coach work together to help you reach your goals. The important thing is to ask questions before engaging someone. You want to know whom they can help and if you fit that profile, what their background is, and how long it might take to get to your goal. Ask for referrals from the coach to the financial adviser or from the financial therapist to the financial planner. And don’t forget to check out their website to see if you like the way they represent themselves. Ask questions, and note whether or not you get answers that you understand, that make sense to you. Having the right adviser who is savvy about the issues and concerns that you have will make all the difference in your experience.

© 2011 Luna Jaffe

Here we’ll explore money concepts, tips and strategies that specifically help creatives and women.

I promise working with Lunaria Financial is different. Here’s why:

The usual process of financial planning tends to look at your assets and liabilities, your income and investments, without considering what you value or how you learn. Financial planners like to bring out the charts and pages of data to impress upon you the importance of each financial decision. Financial planners are rarely tuned-in to the creative process or to the right brain. It may not be a language that most financial planners speak or value.

You know this, and I know this. We’ve experienced it

Perhaps you have sat in a sterile office seeking advice from a financial adviser-a man in a business suit with a firm, impersonal handshake-only to have him spend the whole appointment looking at and talking to your husband! Or maybe you went alone, and felt bullied or intimidated by the volume of information being thrown at you. And at the end of the appointment you realized that you understood nothing, but could not ask questions because you did not want to look stupid. You were lost in the first five minutes, leaving you in a fog for the rest of the meeting, believing they had a reason for excluding you from the conversation.

As a financial planner I commonly hear from clients who don’t know what to do with their money. They do not know whom to trust, and it’s hard to turn the volume down on the voices in their head reminding them of all the ways they’ve screwed up in the past.

In my career as a financial planner I learned early on that I don’t see things the way I was taught. I don’t want simply to sell stocks or mutual funds. I want to build relationships. From the beginning, my background as a psychotherapist and professional artist has informed everything, from the look of my office to the seminars I create for my clients.

I designed Lunaria Financial to meet the needs of those of you who want to work with a Certified Financial Planner™ who takes the time to listen to your needs and frustrations; someone who will teach you how to feel more in charge of your finances; an adviser who’s not afraid to draw pictures, tell stories, laugh and delight in the process of creating a financial road map that you love, you understand and you’re motivated to use.

I started this business because as a woman, artist and therapist I struggled to master my financial world. I’ve spent my life working to master financial concepts then putting them to work in my life. My mission is to share what I’ve learned with you.

Here’s what you will not find at Lunaria Financial:

• A sterile office without personality in a high-rise or strip mall. Not on my life.
• Pushy sales tactics underlined by scary statistics using words you don’t understand. Just can’t go there.
• Boring, non-existent, or intimidating communication. We are too interested in you for this.
• A cookie-cutter approach. One size does not fit all!
• Discounting your life experiences, making your successes and failures irrelevant. It’s here that we often find diamonds)
• A linear, analytic, left-brain-is-king process.

At Lunaria Financial, what you will find is a trusted financial guide and translator. I bring financial concepts to you instead of expecting you to conform to the linear world of investing and investments. I point out options and possibilities, and make recommendations based on having taken the time to know you. I can talk to your other advisors, and you can rest assured that you’re being heard and translated accurately. Not only do I provide you with a comprehensive set of tools that you can access from home so that your financial plan is dynamic and relevant. I also give you an opportunity to deepen your understanding of your relationship with money.

Come meet me and be greeted by our two sweet office dogs, Chana and Bella, in our art-filled office in the center of Multnomah Village. Or we’ll meet you on Skype! We look forward to it!

© 2011 Luna Jaffe