I don’t invest in mutual funds, but I know that many of my poor, deluded readers do 😛 For you, The Dough Roller provides some tips … and, for the rest of us, he mentions this blog. Thanks, Dough Roller!
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I posed a seemingly simple question: What is the MOST important Making Money 101 tool of all?

After all, this is basically the subject of almost all of the 2,500+ personal finance blogs in the blogosphere … how to save your way to wealth. We know that it can’t be done, but that doesn’t stop all of those poor blighters from trying … and, worse, writing about it 😉

But, it is an important part of making money, which is why we devote a whole subject to it …

[AJC: Which gives me the fleeting idea for yet another reader poll: which is the most important Making Money stage of them all: MM101, MM201, or MM301? But, you would all too quickly see right through the question: making lots of money (MM201) is useless if you (a) spend it before you get it (MM101) and/or (b) let it slip right out of your fingers once you have it (MM301) … ergo, they are clearly ALL important!]

Now, I thought that I would be pretty smart and ask questions that would lead you away from the ‘hidden gem’, and I could then glide in on my blogging-white-charger and whisk you right off your financial feet with a princely nugget of wisdom, just as you were nodding in agreement with the poor misguided fools who submitted non-optimum answers …

… but, ‘ask the audience’ came bloody close to winning the 7 million dollar question!

Although the majority response was split nearly 50/50 between the ‘common wisdom’ answer and the one that I thought (hoped!) would slide right under the radar, nobody said it better than Ryan:

Without delayed gratification, why would we save money at all? We’d just live paycheck to paycheck and hope we never…didn’t get a paycheck!

And, what pees me off even more is that the general comments, covering all of these choices and more, were so on-the-mark that I could stop writing this blog … but, will instead just have to shift into higher gear [AJC: hang on tight!].

So, yes …

…. this was another almost-trick question in that they are ALL clearly important, but, this is an experiential blog, in that my financial advice is largely shaped by my own experience (much more so than somebody else’s ‘theory’) and, when I looked back it was delayed gratification more than anything else that seemed to keep me out of the poor house … then and now.

Why delayed gratification?

Because it is a habit for a lifetime; it will keep you from spending all of your money:

– when you don’t yet have enough of it

– while you are still struggling to get more of it

– when you have what should already be enough of it

… and, for those whom ‘delayed gratification’ has not yet become habit, we broke new ground by inventing 7million7year’s Patented Delayed Gratifier [AJC: no, it’s not something most commonly found in an Adult Store 😉 ] a.k.a. The Power of 10-1-1-1-1

There you have it: delayed gratification, what I – and, you – believe to be the most important Making Money 101 tool of them all 🙂

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