A CD is an FDIC insured place to put your money. You can put the money in a CD for a set period of time, and collect it with the interest (usually pretty high) at the end of the agreed period.

So you want to find the best CD rates out there? Me too. The best I’ve found are:

BankRate.com
MoneyAisle.com
MonitorBankRates.com
Bankaholic.com

There are, of course, dozens of websites that provide similar services. Even mine that I linked to above explains how you can find the best CD rates. Just keep looking, and you’ll be sure to find them — no need to worry about your credit.

Online savings is fantastic for people who have found one of the many real online jobs. In that case, you can make all of your banking completely automatic and electronic.

Related posts:

1. Why You Shouldn’t Sell Those Stocks
2. Three Problems With an Online Savings Account
3. 5 Reasons You Should Get Rich

But we aren’t talking about money in and of itself. Is it okay for you to amass wealth? Is it moral to own a BMW? To have a bank account with enough funds to allow three other people to retire? Shouldn’t you give your money away when you spend it? Aren’t you an evil, unfulfilled person when you do well?

You aren’t evil if you are financially well off. It’s perfectly moral to be rich. In fact, it’s part of the American Dream. If you believe serving others is the foundation of morality, it’s still moral; wealth almost automatically ends up helping others. That’s just how the economy works.

Below are five reasons I support the idea of building wealth here at Personal Development.

1. You’ve Earned It

As we discuss in Why Some People Always Succeed, success comes to those who focus on creation. Always making things better, trying new ideas, focusing on productivity; the creator nearly always succeeds in the long run.

On a similar note, the opposite individual will not succeed. Short of winning the lottery, lazy, uncreative people never become wealth. They never build a passive system of income (something I’ll be writing about in the future). People who don’t create won’t win.

This means one fact: if you’ve built your wealth, you deserve it. With a few exceptions (an inheritance, the lottery), those who have built wealth did so by helping society as a whole, strengthening the economy, creating jobs and helping others.

Reality rewards creators. There’s a reason high-paying jobs are high paying. CEOs, investors, webmasters, managers, business owners, authors – all of these individuals build wealth through creation.

If you end up rich, chances are you’ve earned it and then some.

2. Don’t Worry, Be Happy

One of the most puzzling myths in our culture is as ironic as it is puzzling. Western society is the richest society in the history of the world, yet it’s uncommon at all for individuals who live in the relative luxury to make claims such as, “Money doesn’t buy happiness.” Of course, they are absolutely right. Money is a tool, and can’t guarantee happiness. There are many rich people who are unhappy. There are also many poor who are unhappy as well.

This doesn’t mean, however, that money can’t increase your happiness. Money isn’t everything, but of course it helps.

SmartMoney Magazine actually wrote a bit about this in one of their recent articles:

“It may not be comforting to folks who aren’t minting cash, but the rich really are different.”There’s no group in America that’s happier than the wealthy,” says Taylor, of the Harrison Group. Roughly 70 percent of millionaires say that money “created” more happiness for them, he notes.”

Interesting word choice, isn’t it? Money “created” happiness for people who created money. Creation is one of the fundamental “purposes” of all persons. I’ll be talking about this in the future, so make sure to subscribe at the end of this article.

In the end, it should be fairly obvious why creating significant wealth can lead to at least an increase in happiness. You don’t have to worry about credit card debt, making the mortgage payments, saving enough to stay in style. Money makes life easier.

3. Being Rich Doesn’t Harm Others

There seems to be a rather baffling view when it comes to money. Perhaps we should blame it on the educational system; the view could be extinguished with a healthy dose of basic high-school level economics. The view is this: If someone is rich, that means someone else has to be extra poor. This simply doesn’t reflect the way the economy works.

An “economy” is basically money flow. It’s a question of how money moves from one person to the next. Just being “rich” doesn’t mean that the poor have less money, or that someone else will be struggling. There are several reasons for this, including more than even those listed below. The few listed below are just the tip of the economic ice-burg for why every economy simply benefits from the wealthy.

No Cap. Put simply, there’s no reason to think that because someone has two dollars that someone else is two dollars short. The reasoning is simple: the impact of every dollar is much, much bigger than the “static” amount of money that exists.

For example, I have a couple of hundred in my wallet. By the end of week, I’ll have spent it and someone else will have it. Next week, another person will have the hundred. After that, another person will have the money, and so on and so forth. This means that the “real” impact of every dollar is much, much greater than whatever is sitting in my wallet.

If I have ten bucks or a thousand bucks, in a few weeks someone else will have it regardless. This is money-flow. Rich people aren’t financial black holes, sucking money from the economy. If anything, the rich are often the creators that we talked about in Why Some People Always Succeed.

New Business. If everyone is barely scraping by, paycheck to paycheck, new businesses won’t be created; there wouldn’t be enough money saved up to handle the necessary costs. “Risky” ideas that only venture capitalists would support will never happen, period. Eventually, the economy will collapse without growth.

This means the exact opposite happens with the wealthy, supposing a free enterprising system like the one in the United States and a lot of Europe; the wealthy can launch businesses much quicker. The same goes for you. The more you have the more you can create. The more you create the more the economy benefits.

Jobs, business, choice; these are the end result of creators doing what they do best: create, build,
produce and achieve.

In short, if you are wealthy, it’s not because you are evil and want to suck money away from everyone else while laughing evilly on the way to the bank. Creators always end up creation creations which in turn cause more creation.

4. Got Money? Give More

In an odd paradox, the “super poor” often get more money due to some people having a boat-load of money. The lower and middle classes are usually focusing on making ends meet, as we talked about in “Save Money or Make Money.”

One of the consequences of working just to stay afloat is that there is rarely enough to pass on through charity. Almost all of the inheritance will go to making sure the kids and family have a little to make it on. Almost all of the week’s earnings go to food, transportation (I spent $4.08 on gas, today), housing and other basic expenses.

Now take a look back at someone like Warren Buffet. When he dies almost the whole 50+ billion are going to charity. The same goes for Bill Gates and a slew of others. There’s a reason hospitals name wings of new buildings after successful individuals, there’s a reason we see scholarships named in the honor of a rich person: being rich means you can help in a big way.

This isn’t to suggest that I’m trying to paint wealth as something purely selfless. Of course it’s selfish to make money. And that’s a good thing. Just read below.

5. Everyone is “Selfish”

This is the part where we’ll focus on the personal development side of the entire idea. Nearly everyone in popular culture claims to support “selflessness” while condemning anything done for “profit” or “selfishness.” The idea that “selfishness” = “evil” is so entrenched in our culture and society that challenging is considered absurd.

A few months ago I watched a video on YouTube where a young philosopher was attempting to explain why selfishness can certainly be justified. A video response to the philosopher showed someone passionately against what was being argued. The entire response looked something like this: “You can’t just be selfish! I mean, it’s just that it…just, well, it just sounds so selfish.” There wasn’t a reason given.

The truth is, everyone is “selfish” to a certain degree. I’ll be writing a more detailed article explaining this in the future, but for now, let’s just take a step back and look at, well, everyone.

TV is not necessary; neither are computers, snacks, desserts, “fun books”, most magazines or nearly every hobby in existence. Is it wrong to utilize these things, or take these actions? It would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would suggest so. Even still, these things are certainly selfish.

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying oneself. We’ll be going into more detail about this in future articles so make sure to subscribe. I’d love to see your thoughts, so stay tuned.

Being rich doesn’t require that anyone is harmed. Wealth is built through helping others. Creators deserve to be wealthy; creators have earned their wealth. Having wealth means you are more able to help others.

Bottom line: whether you want to help others or help yourself, being wealthy gives you more potential for doing accomplishing your goals.

Related posts:

1. Save Money or Make Money?
2. Personal Finance: Don’t Be So Defensive
3. The Creator Personality

Reading fairly common threads of thought can be helpful to see where most people are “coming from.” Many of the sites are dead on; most personal finance sites emphasize the saving of money, smart investing, financial analysis and all around great personal finance advice.

But most personal finance websites are wrong. Don’t get me wrong, the basic principles certainly work to a certain extent. But only to an extent. The view ends up causing those who follow it to settle for much, much less than they can achieve. To understand the following concept just make sure to read the entire article.

Defensive Personal Finance

Personal finance websites encourage investing and saving, and they certainly should. The reason we want to save/invest is the bottom line; we end up with more money to spend on larger material possessions, retirement and other things. This is the ultimate reason for having a job, saving money, investing, etc. The purpose of personal finance is material.

The typical advice for personal finance looks something like this:

Want to build wealth? There’s one sure-fire way to do it, and it will take from now till your 70s. Be frugal and save, save, save. Focus on ways you can save money. Find ways that you are wasting money. Save! If you have to, skip lattes, drink water, downsize your house — just save your money and invest it. The key of success is to be frugal, thrifty and to save, save, save. Save a few thousand per year more than you spend and you’ll have a nice egg in 20-30 years.

This is all fine and dandy if your goal is to live well only in the future. This method emphasizes saving more than you make. It emphasizes holding back, cutting expenses, downsizing your lifestyle and saving. And it’s this mindset that destroys the potential to achieve.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with saving. Everyone should most certainly save a portion of their income. I save constantly, keep a budget and never violate it. If I continue at this rate, I’ll have a dandy retirement in a few years.

But let’s look at how this emphasizes the lifestyle. In order to understand it, let’s analyze the life of Frugal Danny.

The Story of Frugal Danny

Frugal Danny is a frugal man, and focuses on saving his money. His personal finance philosophy is, “it’s better to do without than to spend.” He makes sure that everything he does is the cheapest possible. He only drinks water when he goes out to eat, never gets steak, doesn’t listen to much new music, doesn’t go to the theater and he lives in a small apartment.

Danny has an okay job as a technician and makes $15-per-hour and $30,000-per-year. His wife a three kids require a lot of time and money, so his job just barely makes ends meet. Danny doesn’t have the luxury of having luxuries. Every year his family invests $2,000 from all of the scrimping, saving and cutting costs. He and his wife talk about money for at least a half-hour every night.

When retirement rolls along and he’s 65, Danny is going to have 1.5 million. He is going to get about $75,000 to live off every year. He;s excited! When retirement comes, he’s worked hard to get it, and he is planning on spending time working on the garden, walking the dog and watching game-shows.

Unfortunately, Danny will never make it to retirement. He’ll be in a fatal car accident a month before he reaches his goal. His long-term plan won’t be working out for him; the dead need no money.

It might sound odd in story form, but we can learn a lesson from Danny. His lifestyle focused on scrimping and saving, hoping for a distant time in “the future” where he could enjoy the fruits of his labors. That time never came for him.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t save, invest or be relatively frugal. But it does show us the flaw of Defensive Personal Finances. So what should he have done? What can you do? Read below.

Offensive Personal Finance

There are two approaches to personal finance. You can focus on saving more than you spend or you can focus on making more than you spend. The difference is vital to understanding how to manage your money.

Defensive personality focuses on saving money. The emphasis is on holding back, and living in a poverty mindset. The emphasis is on not spending too much. Offensive person finance is different in the approach: rather than looking for ways to scrimp, offensive personal finance looks for ways to earn.

Offensive personal finance does take into account saving and investing, but that’s not where the emphasis lies. The emphasis is in making money. Remember the old quote: the poor work for their money; the rich make their money work for them. That could be modified to: the poor save their way to wealth; the rich build it.

Focusing on saving money is certainly a way to build wealth for the long term, but that’s just it; it’s a long term goal. The best approach to personal finance will have both short and long term impacts on your budget. Want to be successful? Don’t focus on skipping lattes; focus on building another stream of income. Find another way to make money. This doesn’t mean, of course, that you ever skip the life insurance basics (my friend’s website where you can learn the fundamentals — something I don’t have time for here), or you never focus on finding the best savings account or best money market rates — just focus on the short-term as well as the long term scenarios.

By actually making money you are focusing on the now as well as the future, without sacrificing either. Unfortunately, defensive personal finance seems to be reflecting the immortal words of Emerson: “We are always getting ready to live but never living.”

But of course, this all simply begs a question. How on earth are we to discover new ways to make money? Well, SmartMoney reports that building a business of some sort is the best way to generate wealth:

So how do you join the millionaires’ club? You could buy stocks or real estate, play the slots in Vegas — or take the most common path: running your own business. That’s how half of all millionaires made their money, according to the AmEx/Harrison survey. About a third had a professional practice or worked in the corporate world; only 3 percent inherited their wealth.

Building a business is just one way of thinking offensively. Have an obsession? Start a website about it, enjoy yourself and make money. Know a lot about math? Consider tutoring. Turn your skills and assets into another income source, build a business; just think offensively.

This doesn’t mean you should stop turning the lights off when you leave a room. It’s simply a question of perspective; sometimes one’s attitude is just as important as one’s circumstances.

Last Words

We’ll be discussing later why this simple perspective change is vital, and why positive/negative/realistic thinking is incredibly essential to success. Don’t worry, no “new age”, just realistic analysis of the successful and looking for attitudes that win. One last thing; I find the following quote by personal development coach Jim Rohn to be incredibly dead-on:

“Money is usually attracted, not pursued.”

I’ll be writing quite a bit about having an attitude that guarantees success; one that nearly every successful individual reveals. We’ll be talking about how anyone can get what they want in life, it just requires knowing what you want and knowing how to get there. Enter your email below and I’ll let you know when the guides are published.

Related posts:

1. 5 Reasons You Should Get Rich
2. Save Money or Make Money?
3. Rethinking College, a Series of Articles