by Jonathan Pollard

Created on: June 24, 2007   Last Updated: June 25, 2007

Some of you may have heard of personal finance guru, Suze Orman. She has inspired me tremendously and has influenced a lot of my thinking on personal finance issues.

One of the reasons that I'm such a big fan of hers is not because of any particular advice that she gives, but because she is one of the few prominent media personalities who acknowledges that all of our financial decisions are fraught with myriad emotions. The more literature that you read on investing and personal finance, the more you will hear the refrain that in order to be successful with money, one must remove all emotions. To some extent this is true. "Some" is the operative word however.

For instance, if you buy a stock just because you hear a lot about it on tv or on a hunch, without performing a "discounted cash flow analysis" - a process that allows you to determine what a stock's true value is based upon certain growth assumptions - then you are investing with emotions. This is bad. Similarly, if you sell stocks that you have long-term confidence in and that have good financial fundamentals, just because the price goes down for a few months or some media pundit says they're bad, you are also investing with emotion. In these instances, it pays to remove emotions from the equation.

But I believe that in almost every other instance regarding money, it pays to take your emotions into account. Why? I'll explain.

Americans have a ten ton elephant under the rug in their lives. No one wants to talk about money! It is considered taboo, disrespectful, and for most people, it's just downright awkward. In my family, as a child, all of my basic needs were provided for, but we definitely experienced times that were rough (i.e. being evicted from our apartment and having to live with relatives for two years). I could always sense that there was anxiety surrounding money. Some of you may have had experiences similar to mine. I believe that most of our ideas regarding money come from our parents and closest family members, like most of our world views.

So if your childhood was littered with familial arguments about money, you will most likely be tense when confronting the issue. If there was never enough to go around, you may feel the need to hoard and store up without considering the needs of others. (I struggle with this a lot.) Or you may shop compulsively to overcome that feeling of deprivation. If your parents were wealthy and always gave you what you wanted and you never had to work, you may be a

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