My Black Patent Mary Janes

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For today’s blog, I want to share one of my favorite paragraphs from my personal finance book for women, Earn Grow Give; Grow Your Money While Creating a Rich Life. I am celebrating its listing on Amazon this week, but I am planning a great big fun launch with lots of goodies in November in celebration of gratitude month.

The largest crime my mom committed was requiring me to wear my black patent Mary Janes year round, instead of providing me with white shoes for the summer months. I still recall feeling as though I was the only girl in the entire universe without white shoes, completely oblivious to the fact that there were millions of little girls all over the world who would have given anything for a pair of shoes, especially a pair of black patent Mary Janes. What I learned from that horrible injustice is that black patent shoes are appropriate year round. (This turned out to be a very valuable lesson as an adult with my long, skinny feet that look like surf boards in white shoes!) If only I had known, then, the wise lessons my mother was providing that would serve me well for life that went well beyond shoe style.   

One point of view from this story is scarcity mentality; the other point of view is smart and savvy spending (and style!), thus allowing my parents to put aside more money to grow through better cash flow. I like to help women have a healthy mindset about money, and feel that they are deserving of wealth. They can then demonstrate leadership around that wealth.

While a scarcity mentality is certainly unhealthy, and may leave you feeling incapable or undeserving of money, overspending can do at least equal damage, if not more. There is nothing like that awesome feeling of accomplishment when you make progress toward what you really want your money to do for you, or your financial goals.

Leadership involves the wise use of any resource you are responsible for; it calls for being a conscious and deliberate spender. Besides, black patent actually does work beautifully year round!