Sounds kind of nice, doesn't it?
But just think, if you had a tree that grew $100 bills in your front yard, you'd have to have 24-hour surveillance and security! Oh and if the press every got wind of it, you’d be dodging the paparazzi to your grave. No doubt you'd worry about how to keep the tree healthy, and keep the bugs from eating those precious leaves when they started to blossom this coming spring. You'd also fret about how to keep the money in your yard when the autumn winds threatened to blow your crop into the neighbor's yard.
You'd probably end up a nervous wreck. You'd never be able to leave home, or even get all the bills that were at the very top, unless you were a very good tree climber. Maybe it'd be easier to have a hedge fund than a money tree, but you'd still have to guard that too.
With the advent of credit cards, many of us were tempted into living beyond our means. Those pretty, little rectangles made purchasing stuff so easy, especially when you didn't have the money yet! Before I met Nelly (my inner child) in 2002, I was in big credit card trouble. Because I'm a writer and was able to make a good living writing books, when I wasn't writing and the income wasn't there, instead of changing my spending habits, I used credit cards to pretend I was still making money. Fake prosperity. I actually looked at credit cards as income. "Oh, goody, the bank just increased my credit limit $10,000!"
When everything came to a head, I was faced with figuring out how to get out of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. I knew I had to raise my financial consciousness and get out of debt, but I didn't have a clue as to how to do that. What happened was a miracle and I wrote about it in "The GOOD Book: Get Out Of Debt."