Do you manage your money or does your money manage you? Some of you will joke and say, “But I have no money so there’s nothing to manage.” Oh, how wrong you are. And that is the thinking that keeps most people in debt and keeps them from creating an investment program. A couple of things just seeped out of my memory: I can distinctly remember a phrase that my mother used to say constantly, “Money is the root of all evil.” And I remember a time when my father was reading the local newspaper and discovered that the head of the local school board received a raise to $10,000.00 a year. His comment was, “Nobody is worth a salary of $10,000.00.” If that kind of thing doesn’t taint your subconscious understanding of money, I don’t know what does. However, I spent many years working in the investment industry and now help people with income tax issues, funny, eh? But I digress.

For loyal followers of this corner of the digital universe, you may remember that a couple of weeks ago I promised to offer you something to help you save some money so you could create or add to your investment program. I am happy to say that it is now live and helping people to do just that. I have created a new website called Coupon Corral and as the name implies; it is chock full of coupons that you can use to reduce the price of things you buy online. Let me be absolutely clear about something, I one hundred percent support buying locally. We do that but long before the pandemic struck; the world had made a move to buying online. My new website has hundreds of online discount coupons available for everything from snow blowers to scarfs, makeup, health products, clothing and lots more. I am adding more companies every day and the companies are updating their discounts constantly. I have already started promoting it through some Facebook/Instagram advertising and the results are very encouraging.

To get the most benefit out of the Coupon Corral, I encourage you to sign up for the automatic updates from the site and check for discounts when you buy online. Second, take the money, whether pennies or dollars, that you save and put it into a separate savings account intending to invest it as soon as possible. You were willing to spend the full price originally. It is time to manage your money rather than letting it manage you!

Something else caught my eye this week, and probably yours too. There was a news item that told us how someone had sold a piece of digital art for $69,000,000.00!!! They referred to an NFT and that is somehow related to digital currency. Once again, as followers of this blog know, I am currently researching digital or cryptocurrency in order to add a section that will explain it in simple terms. I couldn’t help myself, I had to know what an NFT is and how it connects to digital currency and better yet, how could I perhaps sell some sort of doodle for $69,000,000.00? I bumped into some information from a man named James Renouf who has a very comfortable and understandable way of explaining NFT’s and how they work. In addition, he explains how we might use these in the course of our own life. If it has aroused your curiosity as mine was, go look at his information and stay up to date on how our world continues to change and amaze. Who knows, maybe you can grab one of your kid’s drawings off the front of the fridge and sell it for big bucks – investment program solved!