Feng Shui is an ancient Chinese belief that the arrangement of items in our environment (buildings, furniture, etc.) can have an impact on an individual’s life.
With that being said, I thought it’d be fun to explore a concept that I call Financial Feng Shui.
In other words, how can we arrange our finances in order to attract luck and money?
To answer this question, we need to first identify which financial forces are outside vs. within our control. From there, we can focus our energy on the things within our control in order to maximize our Financial Feng Shui.
Let’s dive in!
How to Attract Luck & Money: 3 Forces Outside Our Control
There are certain financial forces in our lives that are beyond our control.
As a result, it doesn’t make sense to spend our limited time and energy on these types of forces. Instead, we should acknowledge and accept that there are certain things that can not be changed.
With that being said, let’s take a look at 3 forces outside our control.
Where We Were Born (Starting Socioeconomic Status)
Where we were born as well as the family that we were born into is something that we can not change.
As a result, we can not control our initial socioeconomic status. We simply don’t have a say in whether or not we come from a privileged or disadvantaged background.
This is something determined by the lottery of life. We can not change the cards that Life has dealt us.
It’s up to us on how we play these cards.
Because while we don’t have control of our background, we do have control of future financial decisions that can improve and/or decrement our socioeconomic status.
How Other People Act
As much as we like to think that we can influence others, we simply can not determine how someone other than ourselves will react or feel about something.
We can bust our ass at our job, feel like we deserve a raise, but our boss may totally disagree.
In that particular case, our financial situation is limited by another person’s opinion. At the end of the day, we can not force them to believe that we deserve a raise.
When we run into limiting financial situations like this, we need to remember that we alone are our own best advocates. If our own economic advancement is being limited by someone’s opinion, we need to recognize this and make sure we are doing what’s best for us.
An example of what we can do is changing employers and/or transitioning to a new career field.
βWhen you stop growing you start dying.β
William S. Burroughs
We Can’t Change The Past
One of the biggest inhibitors of our own personal financial growth is dwelling on the past.
The best thing that we can do is learn from our mistakes and move on. In the past we may have:
- Declared bankruptcy
- Racked up a ton of credit card debt
- Invested in very risky assets
Whatever we’ve done in the past, we need to leave it in the past. The person that we were back then doesn’t need to be the person that we are today.
Despite having money dysmorphia for years, I don’t dwell on the past because I can not change anything. Instead, I learned from that experience which ended up improving my overall relationship with money.
Accept the past, embrace the future, and live in the present
How to Attract Luck & Money: 3 Forces Within Our Control
With forces beyond our control, we can only passively control our reaction to them.
On the other hand, there are financial forces within our control that we can take a more active approach with in order to attract luck and money.
With that being said, let’s take a look at 3 forces within our control.
Continuous Learning
Attracting money is synonymous with attracting value, whether it’s to yourself or to an employer.
One of the most effective ways to attract value is through continuous learning, especially hard and valuable skills. By developing a specialized skill set:
- We differentiate ourselves from everybody else, which means…
- It’s harder to replace us, which means…
- We have more leverage to earn more money
That is precisely how I was able to recently secure a 15% raise.
At the end of the day, the truth is that our environment is always changing (even if slowly). As a result, we need to be constantly adapting to the new environments by growing our skillsets.
By remaining relevant through continuous learning, we can increase our chances of growing our income.
Taking Calculated Risks
It is easy to stay in our comfort zone.
However, attracting luck and money requires taking calculated risks.
By taking calculated risks, I am not talking about gambling and hoping for the best. It’s about doing as much research as possible ahead of time and logically weighing the risks/benefits of every decision.
Financially speaking, this can take many different forms:
- Transitioning to a different career
- Becoming an entrepreneur and starting a business
- Adjusting our savings/spending patterns to achieve a goal
Why it can be difficult to leave our comfort zone, taking a series of calculated risks is the only way to open up doors that may have been previously closed.
Practicing Patience and Thinking Long Term
The last and most important way to attract luck and money is by having a long-term mindset.
It’s about always showing up everyday and trusting the process, day in and day out.
This is especially true when it comes to building real wealth.
Saving the first $100K is the hardest because it requires us to consistently do most of the heavy lifting ourselves for many years. Likewise, achieving financial independence early in life requires a consistently high savings rate from month-to-month over many years.
Attempting to “short-circuit” our way to wealth is risky business. That is why I personally prefer the less-stressful and more sustainable option of practicing good financial habits, which has a proven track record of leading to wealth in the long-term.
Final Thoughts
Maximizing our Financial Feng Shui is all about understanding what forces we should be focusing our limited time and energy on.
By narrowing our focus on improving the financial forces that we do have control over, it becomes a lot easier to attract luck and money.
Thank you for reading! π
Full Disclosure: Nothing on this site should ever be considered advice, research or an invitation to buy or sell securities, please see my βTerms & Conditionsβ page for a full disclaimer.