My Financial Sorcery Awakening.

One thing that I have been pointing out when I do promo’s for the book is that I am not in the 1%. I am not a millionaire (yet) much less a billionaire. In fact, like many people involved in magic and witchcraft, I really didn’t give money or a career much thought at all. Until recently, I considered money and financial ambition to be at best a distraction from spiritual work, and at worst completely antithetical to it.

Of course in the 90’s pretty much everyone I knew was the same way. Being a slacker was a valid lifestyle choice. I mean, I had a good job and all. I just didn’t care much about it.

I ended the 90s by leaving my job at AIG and moving to Nepal. It was there where, among many other lessons, I got a glimpse into what it means to not really care much about finances through your whole life, and still be kicking around at 60 years old. Let’s just say that the idea of couch surfing in my golden years did not appeal to me.

I realized that since I was not a trust fund baby, that I really only had two choices:

1. Really commit to the non-materialist spiritual path and become a Monk, Nun, or Wandering Yogi.

2. Take finances seriously, and perhaps even bring them onto the path.

I came back to the states, used magic to land a respectable job at a, Internet Telecom that I was in no way qualified for, and a year or so later, I started doing magic for clients for money.

After using magic to survive six rounds of lay-offs at my dot bomb, I took a 6 month severance package and invested in my families hardware store that was failing. Using LOTS of magic and some solid business research I helped downsize and move the store where we re-invented it as a Paint & Window Treatment store – which made it just profitable enough to sell to a larger company.

Shortly after that I wrote my first book for New Page and started getting more magic clients but just enough to pay for magic books and vacations and such. I bought a house. I did all the normal stuff, but really I still can’t say that I was very aggressive about anything. I was stable, but not really planning for retirement or acting with any kind of plan. Lord knows, if I had been paying attention I would not have bought a house when I did.

Then the kids came…

Suddenly I realized that life was going to get really difficult if I did not get serious. I looked at what I was doing magically and realized I had to make another choice. I was either going to be the father who:

1. Complained that they never did X because they had kids which took all their time energy and money.

or

2. Did X as best they could and made money while doing it precisely because they had kids.

X in my case was teaching, writing, and doing magic. I wrote The Sorcerers Secrets when my wife was pregnant. Soon after the kids were born, Strategic Sorcery took shape.

Good thing too, because financially speaking all hell was about to break loose.

My wife needed to take unpaid family leave time after her standard maternity leave. Her position was eliminated and she was out of work for almost two years. I was laid off from my day job, not long after that.

To re-cap, in the middle of the largest financial debacle of our lifetimes, the size of my family doubled, and both incomes were drastically reduced.

Know what happened?

Nothing. Using the principals of Sorcery, Money Management, , and Business hussle we were not late on a single bill. In fact we were still able to put money aside for retirement, (not as much as we would like) and generally not change our lifestyle at all.

So, I admit that I am not a millionaire, but then again I never set out to be one. I came a bit late to the game of even caring about a career or finances. But over the last ten years I have used magic to:

• Land Jobs quickly and efficiently, even without a college degree.
• Own a businesses that succeeds.
• Helped a few businesses fail gracefully – limiting the liability of the owners.
• Put together a retirement plan and found how to stick to it.
• Invested successfully and made money that way.
• Diversified my income so that if one stream fails the other streams pick up the slack
• Weathered the current economic shitstorm with credit score and assets in tact, even though it the storm hit us HARD at the worst possible time.

Now that I write all that, let me just take a moment to thank everyone and everything that helped along the way, because there but for fortune may go I.

The point of all this is just to say that Financial Sorcery works. Far from being anti-thetical to spiritual goals, I find myself more connected to the world through finance, and more able to do good works when I am not worried about putting food on the table.

Plus, when you get over the whole anti-materialist thing – making money is FUN.

Next Thursday I am going to talk about the economic crisis, how it is actually worse than most people think, and what Thaumaturgy is useful for troubled times.

The Thursday after that I am going to lay out a strategy that is NOT in the book, but which is absolutely key for getting magic to provide more than just barely covering the bills.

In the meantime, if you are one of those people who, like the old me, thought of money as unspiritual, I urge you to think again.