new home owner

Yes, I now own my own house. Too bad that it's there and I'm here. But I can plan to incorporate the home into my life starting next year. I might even move in by 2016.

I have always had a vision of a cute cottage in a place with a pleasant climate. I always thought I'd be too chicken to go through with it.

Guess not.

Make your dreams concrete with Dream Boards

During or after the Christmas Holidays, lots of us start formulating our New Year’s Resolutions. Why don’t you jump start a super future by creating a Dream Board?

To get started with how to make a Dream Board, you’ll need these supplies:

-- Poster board. I always use giant flipchart paper.

-- A big stack of different magazines. Make sure you find lots of different types. Or use your old ones and throw the rest away (downsize your stuff, remember?!).

-- Glue. Not Elmers. (It makes the pages ripple.) Rubber cement is perfect. Glue sticks don’t last.

Ask yourself what you want next year, what you want to do, have and whom you want to be with. I love doing this with soft music in the background and a nice glass of wine.

You can also leaf through the magazines with this question in mind.

Step 1: Go through your magazines and tear the images from them. No gluing yet! Just let yourself have lots of fun looking through magazines and pulling out pictures or words or headlines that strike your fancy. Have fun with it. Make a big pile of images and phrases and words.

Step 2: Go through the images and begin to lay your favorites on the board. Eliminate any images that no longer feel right. This step is where your intuition comes in. As you lay the pictures on the board, you’ll get a sense how the board should be laid out. For instance, you might assign a theme to certain parts of the board. Health, Career, Finances, Relationships, Self-Improvement, for instance. Or it may just be that the images want to go all over the place. Or you might want to fold the board into a book that tells a story.  People come up with amazingly creative ways to stage a vision board. It only needs to mean something to you!

Step 3: Glue everything onto the board. Add writing if you want. You can paint on it, cut out text or write words with markers.

Step 4: I like to put an attractive photo of myself in the very center of the vision board. You also could paste yourself in the center of your board.

Step 5: Hang your vision board in a place where you will see it often. This is important and, of course, inspiring. You could ask yourself questions like “What could I do now that would get me closer to these dreams?” or “Which of the themes interest me the most today?”

How to make a vision board if you’re not quite sure what you want:

Go through each magazine. Tear out images that delight you. Don’t ask why. Just keep going through the magazines. If it’s a picture of a teddy bear that makes you smile, then pull it out. If it’s a cottage in a misty countryside, then rip it out. Just have fun and be open to whatever calls to you. Then, as you go through Step 2 above, hold that same openness, but ask yourself what this picture might mean. What is it telling you about you? Does it mean you need to take more naps? Does it mean you want to get a dog, or stop hanging out with a particular person who drains you? You’ll probably know the answer. If you don’t, but you still love the image, then put it on your vision board anyway. It will have an answer for you soon enough.

You’ll have fun doing this with others, too. I have done this with participants of my seminars. It can point you in the right direction, the direction of your dreams.

Learning Flexibility the Humbling Way

So, it looks like I am buying a house. The first time by myself.

Well, not completely by myself. My sister has found this house in Florida and the price was right so I bought it. Well, I'm TRYING to buy it.

I live in Europe and the banks charge humongous fees for transferring money to America. There are open fees and many secret (hidden) fees.

So I looked for a method to send money over to America without paying thousands of euros to a bank. And I found TransferWise.


"The creation of TransferWise was inspired by the personal experiences of Taavet Hinrikus, Skype's  first employee, and financial consultant Kristo Käärmann. As Estonians working between their native country and the UK, they had personal experience of the "pain of international money transfer"^[5] due to bank charges on the amounts they needed to convert from euros to pounds and vice versa. In the words of Hinrikus, "I was losing five per cent of the money each time I moved it. At the same time my co-founder Kristo Käärmann (also from Estonia) was starting to get paid in the UK and was losing a lot of money transferring cash back home to pay for a mortgage there".^[6][7]
It inspired them to make a private arrangement, with Hinrikus – who was paid in euros – putting this currency directly into Käärmann's Estonian account so he could pay his mortgage without having to convert pounds to euros, while Käärmann returned the favour by putting pounds into Hinrkus' UK account.^[8] This arrangement led them to start developing a crowdsourced currency exchange service to offer a cheaper alternative to established institutions.^[9]


From the customer's point of view, money transfers with TransferWise are not essentially different from conventional money transfers: The customer chooses a recipient and a currency, the money to be transferred is taken from his or her account, the transferring company charges for the service, and some time later, the recipient receives the payment in the chosen currency.^[14]
The difference lies in how TransferWise routes the payment. Instead of transferring the sender's money directly to the recipient, it is redirected to the recipient of an equivalent transfer going in the opposite direction. Likewise, the recipient of the transfer receives a payment not from the sender initiating the transfer, but from the sender of the equivalent transfer. This process avoids costly currency conversion and transfers crossing borders.^[15]
In 2012, the company's charges were €1 or 0.5% (whichever is larger) an equivalent amount in the customer's currency.^[16] Conventional money transfer using British banks usually charge considerably higher fees, or require minimum transfer sums and give less competitive rates.^[17]"    Source: Wikipedia

Can I trust my money to Transferwise?

Security is paramount when it comes to money transfers. Transferwise is certified money service company founded in January 2011 in the UK. They have already earned reputation of reliable and honest financial service. There are thousands of people who trust them and using their services on the regular basis. 

How does it work?

International transfers are expensive but what if there were a way to avoid them? There are many people who have similar needs:

• Frontier workers need to send salaries to the country they live
• Expats may want to send money home
• People may need to pay someone (individual or company) who resides in another country

Turns out, their needs could be satisfied without actually sending money abroad. Money can be just exchanged between them. This requires a lot of cooperation and Transferwise is the one who takes the role of coordinator.

I needed to get some money over to the lawyers called Ernest Money. It's like a downpayment I learned. I wanted to do that fast to show I was trustworthy and used my bank. I paid 25€ for the "service" and 15€ to get the money there the next day. A week later, the money was still not there. I went to the bank asking for the 15€ fee to be reimbursed but got only snippy lip service from the teller.

I then tried to transfer the money to TransferWise's account in Munich. My online banking said no. I'm only allowed to transfer 1000€ per day. Not wanting to be doing this the rest of my life, I called the bank. This time, I was treated nicely and was able to have my limit lifted to 100,000€ per day (Hey! I'm buying a HOUSE here!) After a successful transfer on Friday, I tried to transfer the rest of the money on Saturday. No go on that so I'm stuck until Monday.

And all this time the people in America are waiting to close the house. And my sister is nagging me to death because she gets to live there.

No, I'm not stressed. OOOOOOOHHHHHHMMMMM....

The Magic Space Between Daily Events

The breathing space between the things you do is just as important as the things you do.

Pushing the “Pause Button” occasionally for a brief moment to halt hectic and busyness can pave the way to calmness by capturing precious time and mindfulness.  Pausing can also provide you with a break in the habitual action, so you can become aware of “wrong turns” and so, begin again in a new direction when needed. 

It’s tempting to fill in every waking minute of the day with hustle and bustle.  Sometimes you need to leave space to just “be”.

Set aside a little space between every one of your commitments.  Take a break to breathe and calm your mind, take a short walk outside, drink a glass of water, or perhaps do some simple deep stretching exercises.  Appreciate the momentary freedom, and just be.

And remember that this kind of change doesn’t happen all at once.  It happens just one small step at a time.  When it comes to making changes, less is more.

Do you have mile-long to-do lists?  It’s unrealistic to want to accomplish 100 tasks a day, so pare down and compel yourself to make a daily list of no more than 4 core tasks. This means, you must be aware of the highest priorities. You will begin to feel empowered rather than overwhelmed since you DAILY do the most important things.  Just take everything in small, manageable steps. (Don’t even fantasize that you can get everything done!)

Remember the almost forgotten art of leaving tasks/events undone. Eliminate the non-essentials and stop over-committing. Learn to say no. The emotion you get from doing your important tasks is far better and less stressful than the feeling you get from sitting around thinking you should be doing it.

Take care of your future-self today

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today, I am wise so I am changing myself. –Rumi-

You are a work in progress

Most people underestimate how much they change as life goes on.

Dan Gilbert, in many studies, has found out that people would pay on the average $129 to see their favorite music group. Asked if that would be the same in 10 years, they said yes. Yet, when asked how much they’d pay to see their favorite group of 10 years previously, they offered only about $80.

I’m always amazed when people declare themselves unchangeable. “I am what I am. Can’t change that.”

Well, thank goodness we can and do change. Some of us work really hard to become the future selves we envision today. Getting “better” can be a difficult job but can be infinitely satisfying at the same time. I have never talked to a single ex-smoker who was grumpy that he succeeded in stopping! Or to a person on the verge of diabetes who was sorry to have lost weight.

The fight between the present-self and the future-self

If you set goals for yourself and you're like a lot of other people, you probably realize it's not that your goals are physically impossible that's keeping you from achieving them, it's that you lack the self-discipline to stick to them. It's physically possible to lose weight. It's physically possible to exercise more. But resisting temptation is hard.

It seems that only few people have a good contact to their future-self and are committed to doing what is neccessary now to ensure the well-being of their future-self. You are connected to, and legally tied to, this future-self.

The new virtual reality uses software to “age” a subject based on a current picture. Seeing this picture helps the subject build up a relationship with the older version of himself. Behavioral Economist Daniel Goldstein is working on a cool commitment device that ages people’s faces to show what they’ll look like decades later. The fancy version shows the future self going from frown to smile when the present self saves more. (Meanwhile, the present self goes from smile to frown.)

How about the topic of saving? Saving is a classic two selves problem. The present self does not want to save at all. It wants to consume and I was a terrific example of this. Whereas the future self wants the present self to save.

We look at the savings rate and it has been declining since the 1950s. At the same time, the Retirement Risk Index, the chance of not being able to meet your needs in retirement, has been increasing. And we're at a situation now where for every three baby boomers, the McKinsey Global Institute predicts that two will not be able to meet their needs while they're in retirement.

The Behavioral Time Machine, currently in development, seeks to bolster savings rates by connecting individuals with their future selves. Using age-progression software, this tool allows people to see images of themselves 30 years in the future and has been proven in studies to be effective at increasing savings rates.

Showing people what type of apartment they can afford at different levels of retirement savings really helps. People are shown what particular apartments that they can afford if they're retiring on 3,000, 2,500, 2,000 dollars per month and so on. As they move down the ladder of apartments, the subjects see that the living quarters get worse and worse. And as they get to the very bottom, they're faced with the unfortunate reality that if they don't save anything/enough for retirement, they won't be able to afford any housing at all. At a certain rate of retirement savings, the subjects see an attractive living environment. The worst-case scenario is a tent on the street.

The Behavioral time machine is important because it give us an image of our future selves. Because most of us can’t really imagine our future-selves, let alone take care of him/her in the “now”.

Who is going to stick up for your future-self?

At any given moment, you have the power to say: “This is not how the story is going to end”. 

– C.Miller –