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Consider this nugget of wisdom (which I openly acknowledge is not of my creation): Being rich has nothing to do with how much you make, but how much you keep. Put another way, you have to make more than you spend. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the hundreds of billions of dollars owed in American credit card debt, Americans have a very hard time making more than they spend on food, shelter, transportation, insurance, toys, and bling.

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Discipline is what we are missing here. It takes discipline to drive past all those fine restaurants on the way home and eat plain old macaroni and cheese. It takes discipline to ignore the Joneses as they stampede like lemmings toward the precipice. It takes discipline to put our extra income in boring, but fruitful, investments, instead of purchasing huge TVs, clothes, boats, bigger houses or cars. Discipline is dull and so against the grain of our marketing-saturated culture that it has become a bad word.

Nevertheless, the natural order of the universe is that everbody must pay the piper sooner or later. The universal law of the harvest states, You reap what you sow. You can’t put wild spending, lack of planning or budgeting, and amassed debt into a box and pull out a comfortable retirement. Think grasshoppers and ants.

Just a simple message today: if you want the good life, learn first to discipline your financial behavior and live within your income. No amount of education or job opportunities can compensate for lack of financial discipline.

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