How would you live differently if you knew you only had a few months, weeks, days or hours to live? Would you not do things differently?

“I would sell everything and go on an adventure,” says one person.

“I would give all I had away,” from another.

Not one person talks about how much money they would save. No one mentions building anything for the future. In fact, in such discussions, the future is eclipsed by the present. “Now” trumps “then”.

So why not? Why shouldn’t we make the future yield to the ever important present?

Why should we set money aside? Plan? Shouldn’t we all just eat, drink, be merry? I mean, after all, we’ll all be dead tomorrow. Or at most a few tomorrows after that.

I wonder if the former CEO of the nation of Egypt felt this pressure. A few thousand years ago this guy named Joseph was leading this, the most powerful nation in the known world. History records that for his first seven years he focused most of his efforts on building for the future.
Stop.
I’m sure there must’ve been a lot of people who disagreed with him. The “opposing …

Maybe the people of North Dakota have figured out the circles.  At the end of the fiscal year they will have a $700 million surplus (see the full story here).

In a bad economy.

Like North Dakota you must figure out how to manage three circles. What are the circles?

Despite the seemingly endless things you could do with your money, there are really only three choices:

Consumption
Contributing to Others
Contributing to the Future.

That’s it.

You must decide how much money you are going to consume, use up, burn. Each of us has to live, and to do so requires consumption. You must also decide how much to contribute to others. How much of what is yours will you send to help those in need around you. Finally you must decide how much to contribute to the future. In today’s economy, many people are wishing they would have paid more attention to this last, critical category.

The sizes of the circles vary from person to person and you don’t get to tell someone else how to manage their circles.

How are you managing your three circles? How much goes into each one? No one will move from consumer to contributor without having an understanding of their personal …