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"A fascinating exploration into how we think about money and why - and more importantly, what we can do about it.

I strongly recommend it."

David Bach, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Start Late, Finish Rich and Fight for Your Money

Money talks - but what is it really saying? If money were math, we'd simply have it, spend it, earn it, and save it. But our relationship with money is more complex than that. We breathe life into money, and give it emotional value. We use it to punish and reward ourselves, to do things that money isn't designed to do. And that's where things get complicated.

Each one of us has our own personal relationship with money, our money story - which is nothing less than the sum total of our financial history: what we've been taught about money, how we've been conditioned to saving and spending it, not to mention how our brains physically respond to money - how we feel when we make it and spend it. Our brains have patterned responses to money, and thus every cent we spend is at its heart an emotional investment and sets off a corresponding chemical state.

Welcome to the world of neuroeconomics, the scientific intersection of psychology, economics, and neuroscience. In THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF MONEY

(McGraw-Hill; August, 2009, HC, $25.95) , former psychiatrist and current financial coach David Krueger casts his scientific eye on the brain's relationship with currency, and uses neuroscience to decode our money stories. In this economy, there is no better time to have a deeper understanding of your emotional connection to money; it can mean the difference between a comfortable retirement and filing for bankruptcy.

Combining science and application, Krueger gives readers a guided tour to the subconscious meanings we give money, and the often illogical ways we handle it. In the process he helps us pull back the curtains on our darkest, deepest, unspoken financial secrets, and offers prescriptive suggestions toward better habits. Your perception of money - the feelings it engenders - the idea of money as a "thing" - the realities of it in your daily life, how spending it makes you see yourself, and how all these varying concepts square with one another can deeply affect your financial present and future.

Why did so many wealthy people and otherwise intelligent money managers blindly trust a financial advisor like Bernie Madoff? Why would a graduate from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Business pay $450 in an auction to win a $100 bill? How have Americans' collective credit card debts reached a staggering $972.73 billion? Why do some millionaires live like paupers? How do people who start out financially comfortable end up bankrupt? Neuroeconomics, contends Krueger, is at the heart of every financial transaction and every money story, including yours.

Readers may be shocked to recognize themselves in Krueger's deconstruction of destructive spending patterns. Debt cycles, competitive and compulsive spending, availability bias, herd mentality, and spending justifications might be murdering your wallet. By attuning ourselves to the subconscious messages money is sending us, we will be better able to understand our motivations and spending habits - as individuals and even as a society - and will gain the knowledge and power we need to rewrite our financial histories.

A compelling blend of scientific data, neuroeconomics, psychology and practical advice,this book will help you decipher your own secret language of money and equip you with the knowledge you need to live a richer life.

About the Authors:

David Krueger formerly practiced and taught psychiatry and psychoanalysis for more than 25 years. He is currently CEO of MentorPath, an executive coaching practice serving corporate executives and healing professionals, and he serves as Mentor Coach and Dean of Curriculum for the Coach Training Alliance. Krueger lives in Houston, Texas.

John David Mann has been writing about business, leadership, and the laws of success for more than twenty years. He is coauthor of the Wall Street Journal bestseller The Go-Giver and the Silver Nautilus Award-winning A Deadly Misunderstanding and author of The Zen of MLM. He lives in Massachusetts.

Read more at www.thesecretlanguageofmoney.com.

THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF MONEY

How to Make Smarter Financial Decisions and Live a Richer Life

David Krueger with John David Mann

August, 2009; Hardcover, $25.95

0071623396 / 9780071623391

"THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF MONEY

is not really about your income, expenses, assets and investments, although it will change how you view and manage all of these.

It is about your relationship with money and how it affects everything in your life.

Money does talk - but what is it really saying? ...What are you saying through money?"

- Author David Krueger

Conspicuous consumption is when you buy a red convertible and drive it into the middle of a busy street.

Contemptuous consumption is when you buy a red convertible in the middle of a mid-life crisis and drive it by your ex-wife's house.

Defiance. Having established a budget that we know is in our best interest, when confronted with something we really want, we question authority. This adds a flavor of heroic nonconformity to our defiant purchase - even though the only authority we're really challenging is our own.

Denial and the psychology of credit cards. Only psychology could explain how so many are duped by paying the minimum. Why deliberately choose to make an original debt of $5000 at 17 percent blossom into over $16,000, over 40 years? Why wouldn't we pay the debt off all at once?

Disavowal. Research has shown that credit card users tend to underestimate significantly how much they owe on credit cards. Lawrence Ausubel, an economist at U. of Maryland, found that cardholders admit to only four of every ten dollars they owe. Why? Shame, which leads us to bottle up our shameful actions as a closely guarded secret. We wish we hadn't done what we did, and so decide to pretend that we actually didn't. This can lead to not opening the bills; paying the minimum while taking careful steps to avoid seeing the actual balance due; hiding bills from a spouse or family member; lying about bills; and shunting balances from one credit card to the other.

Nostalgia Bias is the tendency to regard past events as having been better than they really were at the time. Nostalgia recalls the ideal rather than the real. Thus, we attribute the bad real estate deal (when we think of it at all) to market conditions beyond our control. But that lucky stock buy? Pure genius.

Perceived Value: In blind taste test trials held by researchers at Caltech (to see how different factors influenced people's choices) where subjects knew only the price of a bottle of wine, people consistently rated a $90 bottle as better tasting than a $10 bottle. There was a catch, though: The $90 price tag wasn't always attached to the same bottle. When researchers swapped the pricier selection out for a $10 wine, subjects still preferred it.

The Risk Factor. Dopamine is the pleasure chemical: It produces an excited state or "natural high" in response to unexpected rewards. Serotonin is more responsible for our mood over time and helps maintain a sense of safety, security, and confidence. While walking away with a big win (like in poker, or the motivation for a commission) elevates dopamine, the experience of loss causes a far more significant drop in serotonin than in the rise in levels caused by experiencing euphoria. This is why short-term investing can be so inherently self-destructive.

MONEY TALKS....

A Conversation with David Krueger

Author of THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF MONEY

Q. We say "Money talks." What's the secret language it uses?

A. Money is so simple-yet at the same time, so complicated, because it operates in our lives on so many levels that are emotional, unspoken and unconscious.

We say, "Money talks," but that's not all it does. It also whispers in our ear, often just below the level of our conscious awareness. Money speaks to us as confidante, seducer, adversary, protector or drug. Money serves as a tangible container for such subjective matters as hope, ambition, love and disappointment. Money can become a currency of caring, a symbol of success, a measure of power, a promissory note for happiness, or filler for a sagging sense of self.

THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF MONEY is just that: a secret, foreign, hidden and often inscrutable. And because we don't speak The Secret Language of Money - the psychological and symbolic language that weaves our outwards lives - we do strange things with money. We make money mistakes, driving ourselves into debt, despair, and depression. We over-spend, under-save, and deceive ourselves. We covet what we want, and don't pursue what we truly need.

Q. Why do we make so many money errors?

A. We make money mistakes because we use money to accomplish non-financial goals. We seek to use money the thing to do what no "thing" can: regulate our moods, increase our self-esteem, and control others. We use money to try to soothe emotional pains and buy the respect of others and ourselves. In doing so, we take money the thing and turn it into something more. We give money meaning. We breathe life into it, give it emotional value, build a relationship with it, and make it bigger than it is.

And then something strange happens.

The moment we begin to make money more than the simple, tangible thing it is, more than the coins and papers and paychecks we grasp so well, we stop understanding it. Our clean equation of 100 cents to a dollar begins to spawn new variables that we cannot readily define. Ironically, when we give money meaning, we begin to lose our grip on what it really means.

Q. What are the kinds of money conversations we have with ourselves?

A. The secret language is the one we speak to ourselves - the internal dialogue that is often silent - of what we tell ourselves about money. What keeps the language of money a secret is the fact that it remains largely unspoken. In fact, this inner money dialogue is the most powerful conversation - and it can be powerfully successful or powerfully harmful. It's there that we create the money stories that can lead us further away from financial independence.

You have a dialogue in your mind before you make the decision to exchange your money - your time and energy for something. Is it different with cash versus a check versus a credit card? Depending on the amount? This has become so automatic that this default decision is nonetheless a decision proceeded by a dialogue. It can emotionally override a logical game plan, or join crowd momentum during an extreme market mood. And every exchange involves two asking prices: financial and emotional.

Q. You speak of each person's money story. What's a money story?

A. Your money story is not the outward tale of your rise to riches or battles with bills. It's not a linear graph of fluctuations in your bank account or investment portfolio. Your money story is the unconscious tale you continually tell yourself about you - Who you are, what money means to you, what money says about you. It also tells you how much you think you deserve, and how much you think you're worth.

Without realizing it, we use money every day to tell a story about our lives and ourselves. Our money story permeates everything we do. It ghost writes every aspect of our lives. What we eat, drink, read, fear, plan, and buy are all affected by our money story. Our health, our jobs, our families, our dreams - they are all impacted by our money story. Day by day, thought by thought, dollar by dollar, our money story becomes our life story.

Everything happens in your life at this moment as an expression of your money story. And the story tells most about the teller. The storyteller determines the fate of the characters and the twists in the plot. It's the storyteller who decides whether a money story is a tragedy or a triumph.

Q. What will this book offer the reader?

A. This book will make the reader fluent in THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF MONEY . You can learn the language to create an informed, strategic, and successful money story. It will illuminate money stories and mentor their rewriting. Money is a simple tool that you can master and write a new money story.

This is a Michelin Guide Book for your relationship with money. A good guidebook will provide information, illuminate options, map possibilities, and even mentor a journey. But it won't tell you where to go or what you should do.

To write a new money story, one of abundance, we need to bring our unspoken money story into the light. I provide readers with an effective, proven framework of clear steps to create their new money story. And how to use this system of change to shift habits and behaviors to get new results and incorporate it as part of their identity.

Read more at http://www.thesecretlanguageofmoney.com/