Financial advice that works when times are good is a dime a dozen.

Financial advice that works in all financial conditions is harder to come by. If that’s what you’re looking for, you might check out Right Riches For You – a new book, website, and seminar program by best selling author and Access Consciousness founder Gary Douglas and Dr. Dain Heer.

Featured on The Balancing Act on Lifetime TV, Douglas and Heer boil the basics of finance down to four essential components: having money, generating money, educating yourself about money, and generosity of spirit.

Having money? Isn’t that a chicken or the egg problem, you might ask. “If I had money I wouldn’t have a problem!” you may be thinking.

That’s precisely the point, say Douglas and Heer. They have noticed that one of the first mistakes of people who do not have money is their inability and unwillingness to actually have money.

One of their first recommendations to people suffering from money problems is to put away 10 percent of every dollar, euro, and pound that comes it and never spend it.

If you’re one of those who immediately wonders, “What’s the point of having it then, if you can never spend it?” then this advice absolutely applies to you. The problem is that many people – probably including you if you asked this question – say they would like to have money, but what they really desire is to spend money.

“If the only value you see to having money is to spend it, then you will never have money to spend,” comments Douglas.

Which is precisely the point of the first exercise, which Douglas calls “tithing to the church of you.” The universe sends us more of what we honor, he notes. When your first action with any money that comes in is to pay your bills, then the universe rewards you by sending you more of what you honor – more bills! How’s that working for you?

A second way to develop the feeling of having money is to always carry in your wallet the amount of money you would carry if you were extremely rich and money was not a problem. The amount is flexible, depending on your own perceptions of what it would be.

And if you’re one of those who’s always spent everything you had – yes, the money you carry with you in your wallet can be part of the 10%, as long as you never spend it!

Both of these exercises are designed to develop having money as a way of being, and the recognition that having money has nothing to do with your bank account, is the key to their success. Having money is an energy that you are willing to be and have, points out Douglas. When you are willing to be the energy of money, you are then willing to have it and spend it both. You will have peace with money and choice.

The second component of their four-point Right Riches program is learning to generate money. More opportunities to do so surround you than you can imagine, Douglas and Heer point out. “In order for anyone as creative as you are not to have buckets of money, you have to be actively pushing money away with both hands,” says Douglas.

One question you can use to find these opportunities is to ask, “What else can I add to my life that will bring me obscene amounts of money, today and in the future?” It is tempting to look for places to “cut back” in challenging economic times, say Douglas and Heer. But does that actually work? They have observed with their clients that what cutting back actually creates is a contraction of our points of view and our lives, and a lessening of income tends to follow this contraction.

Many times our difficulty with money is not a problem with money itself, they say, but with our unwillingness to receive it. Sometimes we have judgments of who we will receive money from. “Are you willing to receive money from anyone stupid enough to give it to you?” asks Douglas. The awkwardness this question evokes is one indication of the silly barriers we erect to receiving money from all kinds of sources.

Another limitation to receiving money that many of us create is the assumption that money can only come from our paycheck. If we believe that is true, it becomes our reality. Our reality can then no longer include windfalls of any kind, from finding a hundred dollar bill in the gutter to winning the lottery.

Oftentimes we ignore our own greatest potentially money-making talents, say Heer and Douglas. “There is something that is so easy for you that you assume you couldn’t possibly get paid for doing it. It’s so easy for you that you think, ‘Nobody would pay me for doing that! It’s so easy for me that everybody must be able to do it.’” The way out of this is another question, “What do I love to do and is so easy for me, that I assume no one would ever pay me for?”

Another key to generating money is having fun doing it. Of course, this flies in the face of everything you’ve been taught by your parents that making money is hard work! Douglas and Heer flatly contradict this. “To generate the kind of money you would like to have in your life, you have to enjoy what you do,” they say. Even more radical is the role of happiness in creating money. Too often people assume once they have enough money, they’ll be happy. Just the opposite is true, they say, “Money follows happiness!” The happier you are, the more money you will invite into your life.

A third component of the Right Riches program is educating yourself about money. “What did your parents actually tell you about money?” ask Douglas and Heer. Most of the time the answer is either “not very much,” or a list of limiting platitudes like “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” and “You have to work hard for your money.” How useful has that advice been? Has it created expansion in your financial life?

One of the steps Douglas and Heer recommend is to get very clear about your finances. How much does it cost you to run your life every month? You have to know this amount in order to know how much to ask the universe for! Knowing the value of everything you own – your net worth – is also part of this process.

Debt, of course, is another part of educating yourself about your own finances. Heer and Douglas recommend using the words “past expenditures” instead of the word “debt.” They suggest looking at the total amount and asking yourself how much more money you would have to create each month to pay all your monthly bills and pay it off in a year. If it’s more than $20,000 total you may have to take two years to do this. Do the math, you will be surprised at how much more easy this is to achieve than you imagine it to be.

The fourth component of the Right Riches program is generosity of spirit. Someone who has generosity of spirit will be happy to hear about the success of others, including their financial successes. You can add a question to your congratulations of others. That could look something like, “Far out! Look what they created! What’s it going to take for me to have something like that or greater?”

Someone who resents others’ success will have difficulty creating and having that very same success themselves. Their point of view will be, “How come they got that windfall and I didn’t?” This point of view perpetuates an economics and life experience of scarcity.

Generosity of spirit also includes being generous with yourself. This can look like nurturing yourself by doing something you love for at least an hour a day and one day a week.

Douglas and Heer also suggest a question to ask yourself to create generosity of spirit. This question is: what would it take for me to be the generosity with money I truly be and haven’t acknowledged?

Albert Einstein observed that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting to get a different result. What would you have to do differently to allow a different financial future for yourself?

• Right Riches for You is available as a book and as a recorded telecall series from www.accessconsciousness.com. Other books and CDs about Douglas and Heer’s approach to generating wealth from outside of the box are available there as well.
• Wealth Creators Anonymous