4.9 - Maintain good financial karma

How you treat money in small ways shapes how money treats you over time. Call it karma, call it pattern, call it the cumulative weight of small choices. The principle is the same: behaving with integrity around money creates a life where money flows; behaving carelessly or selfishly around it creates a life where it doesn't, even when the numbers say it should.

A few practices that hold this whole orientation together:

• Don't steal. Don't pirate software or media. Don't use stolen accounts. Don't share a streaming account with twelve people who aren't in your household. Don't take credit, money, or value that isn't yours. If you can't afford the thing, don't have it. If you can afford it, pay for it.

• Pay back what you owe. If you borrow money from someone, pay them back, on time, in full. If you've owed someone money for years, find them and settle it. Unsettled debts are a small but constant drag on your relationship with money. Clear them.

• Don't do things that hurt people financially or otherwise. Don't take advantage of someone who trusted you. Don't cheat on contracts. Don't profit at someone else's expense in a way you'd be ashamed of if it were public. This is partly ethical, and partly practical: harm you cause to others tends to come back, in ways you don't always see coming. The same principle applies in negotiations. When you hold the leverage, don't squeeze every last dollar out of the other side just because you can. Leave something on the table. Give a little back. Let the other person walk away feeling you treated them well, not like they got hit by a cutthroat shark. The few extra dollars you would have extracted are almost never worth the reputation, the goodwill, and the future opportunity you'd be trading them for. People remember how you behaved when you had the upper hand, and so does the world.

• Be respectful of other people's money. When someone trusts you with theirs, treat it with more care than your own. Pay what you owe on time. Be reliable. Don't be the person who's flaky about money.

Wealth tends to find people who already have a real, abundant, contributing relationship with money. It tends to avoid people who are clever in small dishonest ways. This isn't mystical. It's that the patterns we practice in small things show up everywhere, and people, opportunities, and outcomes notice over time.

Pay for what you use. Pay back what you owe. Don't take what isn't yours. Help where you can. The financial life that emerges from this kind of orientation tends to be much better than the one that emerges from trying to optimize every transaction.