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$200 a month into savings.”
    Sheila is starting to put the lobster platter incident to rest with her new truth: “I hold and benefit from everything that comes my way.”
    Mark is saying over and over again his new truth: “I have the power to put my money in good hands, and I trust the people I’ve chosen to keep it safe.”
    Liz is on the path to forgive herself the UNICEF mishap with her new truth: “I am not afraid.”
    Fears hate more than anything else to be defeated. They will try to invade your new truth like a virus, telling you what you can’t do, not what you can do, telling you what you can’t be,not what you are becoming, telling you what you aren’t—not what you are and have every right to be. Don’t listen. Just keep repeating your new truth the way I did in the elevator.
    What is “income”? Something that
comes in
. Have your new truth with you as you now open the door to new wealth. Your new truth is bigger than your fears, bigger than your debt, bigger than your worries about the future, bigger than all the things you’ve meant to do with your money but haven’t done. Now we will do them.

B EING H ONEST WITH Y OURSELF
    R EALITY CHECK:
T HROW away a four-dollar magazine you never got around to reading—easy. Toss in the garbage five dollars’ worth of food that’s gone bad; you may reprimand yourself, but you probably do it all the time. Buy a sweater on sale for thirty dollars, then notice six months later that you wore it only once; it just didn’t fit right; you give it away. Now try to rip up and throw away a dollar bill. I have found almost no one who could do this without great discomfort. Yet everything about the way the money establishment functions is calculated to distance us from our money, to anesthetize us to its power. The plastic card that slides through the machine so smoothlywhen we make our purchases; the automated voice of the bank’s telephone answering system that robotically answers our money questions; the digital electronic readouts of the stock exchange language that flash on our TV screens for the privileged few who understand it; the instant up-to-the-minute online updates for all our financial transactions. All of these “conveniences” leave us many steps removed from the actual thing. Most of the money we use today is in the form of the plastic cards we use as currency or online purchases that seem to disconnect us from money even more. Isn’t that one reason it’s so easy to spend—“it’s only plastic”?
    One way to get in touch with your money is to actually start
touching
it again, to handle cash, to feel and respect it, to delight in spending it the way you did as a child, to enjoy choosing not to spend it, to take pleasure in putting it away now for later. The use of a debit card, while still plastic, is a step in the right direction, as it is more directly tied to the actual money we have available at the bank.
    This third step toward financial freedom, then, is about getting back in touch with your money and understanding that you have the power to decide how to use it. And it’s about being honest with yourself. You have looked back to your childhood memories of money and connected them to your fears today and created new truths to keep the voice of those fears from paralyzing you against taking action. Now we are about to face your present reality. We will compare the money you have coming in with the money you have going out—real income, real expenses. With this step, by being willing to face up to what you are really doing with your money, your thoughts, actions, and words about money will begin to merge and become truthful. With this step, you begin to take control of your financial life in a concrete way.
    WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO?
    Have you ever taken a big wad of bills from an ATM machine, then found yourself, a day or two later, nearly out of cash and unable to reconstruct exactly where you spent it? And even when you retrace all