July/August 2001

If the business end of freelancing fills you with dread, if you spend all you earn during the feast months and have to scramble during the inevitable famines, if you wonder why you're still hanging on to the low-paying clients you resolved to lose five years ago--in short, if your relationship with money is anything less than idyllic, then Jerrold Mundis has some advice for you.

Mundis, the author of "Earn What You Deserve" and other books about personal finance, gave his "Jump Start Your Income" workshop at the EFA offices last March for an enthusiastic audience of about twenty freelancers. Mundis' interest in his subject is anything but theoretical. In the early 1980s, after more than a decade as a novelist, he found himself in a financial crisis, deeply in debt, with heavy financial obligations and a meager income. "I lived in fear and misery," he says now of that time.

Once he had straightened out his own finances, he began a second career of helping others do the same. In addition to giving workshops and writing books, he also sells audiotapes of his lectures on personal finance.

Don't look to Mundis for advice on picking stocks or doing your taxes. What he offers might be called the Zen of managing money. Not that he doesn't have sound practical advice for freelancers-his guidelines include "Don't spend money you don't have," "Pay yourself a regular salary," and "Spend ten percent of your working time on marketing." His workshop also offered helpful strategies for negotiating rates and developing new clients.

But what interests him most is helping people change their attitudes about money. Money is the last taboo in America, Mundis tells us; people reveal their sexual habits or substance abuse problems more readily than they reveal their incomes or credit histories. Though money itself is morally neutral, it inspires fear, anxiety, shame, and resentment in many of us.

Mundis believes that shedding these negative emotions about money will help us manage it more sensibly and will open us up to financial opportunities that we may be missing. "Like you and me," Mundis says in one of his taped lectures, "money doesn't go where it isn't liked."

Most of the exercises he suggests to his audience are aimed at moving us out of panic mode and into a more enlightened, or aware, attitude towards money. These exercises range from conventional (brainstorming money-making ideas, tracking spending habits) to New-Age therapeutic (confessing money sins to a friend, letting go of resentments involving money) to outright religious (blessing money, entrusting one's finances to the care of a Higher Power). Mundis borrows heavily from the 12-step methodology and from Buddhist and other spiritual practices. Applying these to money management isn't as silly as it sounds, he tells us; if spiritual exercises can help us get out of our own way, why not use them to counter self-defeating behavior in the financial arena?

In fact, he argues, his method is not only useful but necessary. In Mundis' view, most people don't approach money rationally, but treat it as if it had magical or supernatural properties. (It's no accident, he says, that banks are designed to look like Grecian temples.) We can't change our money habits by appealing solely to our rational minds. Lecturing the habitual debtor about the wisdom of saving money will never convince him to start saving; teaching him to envision saving as a gift to himself might just do the trick.

Despite his religious bent, or perhaps because of it, Mundis is humane and humorous, open and non-judgmental. He doesn't insist that you follow his prescriptions to the letter; rather, he throws out a variety of ideas and hopes some of them will resonate with his audience. He isn't offering a recipe for financial success but a complete toolkit for breaking old, dysfunctional habits. If you find yourself plagued by bad financial habits, you might find that some of the tools in this toolkit are the ones you've been looking for.

-- Masha Zager