Wealth is not defined by how many toys an individual has, rather it is defined by how much control an individual has over his/her economic freedom.  A person could have a great house, great car, take vacations every year, and own a boat, but if they’re mortgaged to the hilt and can’t retired until they’re 130, then they aren’t wealthy.

Here are some basic tips on how to be thrifty with your dollars:

• Find places to save - Why buy underwear at Macy’s when you can buy it at Marshalls?  Why buy cans of soda when drink mixes are available?  Little tricks such as these can save you hundreds of dollars a year.  Think of items that don’t need to be new and shiny, these are the easiest places to cut back spending.
• Restaurants or Fast Food, pick one! - Do you like eating a nice steak at a French restaurant or a hamburger at McDonalds?  Take a three month test and forgo happy meals for fine wine, or vice versa.  Find out which you like more and ignore the other.  This can teach you to choose where and when to spend money.
• Why buy from Pottery Barn? - Label whore is a strong term, but we all have a little label whore in us.  We want labels to show people our status, but status and wealth are often complete opposites.  Status is fleeting, wealth is long term.  If you shop at Ross or Marshalls for dishes or home furnishings, you could save tons.
• Put Down the Latte - $5/day X 5 days/week X 52 weeks = 1300.  That means if you buy a latte and a cookie every weekday for a year, you’ll spend $1,300 on shoving around 700 calories down your through.  That makes no sense for your diet or your budget.  Make the latte at home and burn some calories steaming the milk; make yourself a regular cup of coffee at home and eat a piece of toast; or, drink tea.  The idea that five dollar latte’s are normal or a right is false, they are a privilege.  Your are not responsible for making sure Howard Schultz’s stock stays in the black.
• Leave your wallet at home -  Don’t take your debit card with you, it’ll only help you spend extra dollars every day.  Try leaving your debit card in your dresser and give yourself $20 in cash for the week.
• Don’t try cold turkey - Failure can lead us to give up, to quit.  Setting ourselves up to fail is like trying to learn Japanese without a teacher.  Learn bit by bit, start small, make a budget, look for ways to cut back and then move forward.  Trying to end years of learned behavior all at once is foolish, but unlearning it bit by bit will lead you down the right path.

Here are a few tips on how to farm your savings:

1. Early to Bed, Early to Rise Makes an Account Healthy, Wealthy and Wise

Start your savings yesterday, if not sooner!  The earlier you start putting money away, the better.  Don’t think that you can just start when you’re 40, the older you get the harder it is to save.  Just like the later you plant crops, the less your harvest will be.  The older you get, marriage, kids, buying a house, medical bills, etc. pile up.

2. “We Don’t Eat the Sweetest Corn”

An old pastor told me a story once about a farmer who used all the tallest ears of corn (tallest = best) as the seeds for the following year’s crops.  This farmer never ate the best corn, and so his crops were the best.  Translation?  The first part of your check goes to savings; make putting money away THE priority.  Not getting dinner, not buying a nice shirt, not even buying season tickets.

3. You’re Going to Have to Sacrifice

If you insist upon eating out every other night, you might be eating cat food when you’re 70.  Keep in mind that no one who is poor and old intends on being that way, they find themselves there by lack of foresight.  This means limiting your restaurant trips, cutting down on Starbucks, washing your own car, buying socks at Marshalls and so on.  Look for easy places to cut back though, this will make sacrificing easier.

4. “Through discipline, the repetition, you become free.” - Pete Carrol

Okay, Carrol’s a football coach, but farmers wake up and do the same thing over and over and over.  Each little thing has a purpose, a reason, and even if they aren’t “feeling it” they do what is necessary to make sure their corn, soy beans, wheat or whatever is harvested on time.  Saving isn’t something you do once in a while, it’s not a “feeling” it’s a discipline.

5. Oil and Water Don’t Mix

Banks may give you savings and check accounts together, but they are vastly different animals.  Money should flow in and out of checking accounts like a river in order to cover bills, food, utilities and all your other needs.  Savings accounts should be lakes, money should only go in.  Barring medical tragedy or ransom demands, your savings account should only grow, never shrink.

6. You Reap What you Sew

Okay, that’s more Biblical than farming, but true in both.  Sew/plant/save once in a while without learning about the market, then don’t expect much when you’re older.

7. Know Your Soil

Seeds are planted in dirt, good dirt brings good crops, bad dirt brings bad crops.  Know your market, know stocks, bonds, interest rates, inflation, and taxation rules; if you know your soil then you’ll know what seeds to plant when.  Corn is brutal on soil, so planting corn constantly, season after season will eventually wear down the dirt’s natural nutrients and minerals.  Similarly, the stock market is brutal on money and your nerves.  Living and dying by stocks will wear you out, and unless you have millions, and really hundreds of millions, your life will be hell.  Know when to buy, when to sell, when to diversify, and so on.  Take courses, buy books and read them, ask your financial planner for advice, read the business section on Monday, Wednesday and Friday every week to get a sense of the market.

8. Don’t Eat Your Seed

Your money isn’t what empowers you to buy food; in fact if you read the fine print, all your money represents is debt.  Treat your money like you would a seed, that it should be planted in order to bring forth food.  Plant your dollars in places where it will grow, savings accounts with high interest rates (HSBC, E-Trade, WaMu, ING), in stocks that will yield long term growth, in mutual funds that will bring back a conservative but trustworthy return on your investment and in bonds that are government backed.

1. Follow the Yellow Brick Road - Gold is always a sound investment, if for no other reason than it is a physical element.  Investing in a company, mutual fund or bond is investing in an idea essentially.  Gold exists and in times when economies can go batty, gold is always there.

2. Lions and Tigers and Bears - Oh My! - The market is going to scare you, incredibly, but that doesn’t mean the market should be feared.   It’s unstable, but if you leave your money invested long term, your individual wealth will increase.

3. There’s No Place Like Home - Your house might be your best investment.  Again, it’s a physical thing, not a stock in a company that you can’t see.

Well, in developing yourself personally, finances play a big part, and analyzing your goals and your current situation is vital. Here’s a quick look and which bank might be right for you:

1. Bank of America

No bank has had more complaints about it than BofA. Poor customer service, hidden fees and more profligate the comments section of blogs and websites set up to discuss this bank. There are quite a few branches, and it is the largest bank in America, but the availability simply doesn’t seem worth the hassle to let them watch your money. In a survey of poor customer services, this MSN article highlighted BofA specifically as one of the worst customer service providers in the nation.

2. Wells Fargo

This is a regional bank with most of their branches on the West Coast. They seem to be better than Bank of America, and having banked there I can say they aren’t that bad. The challenges however are many. Despite being a West Coast bank, their computers switch over after 3:00 or 4:00 pm EST and all deposits made after that aren’t cleared until the next day. This is extremely frustrating. They were ranked as the number one online bank by one survey, and I can attest to their prowess in online services.

3. Citibank

If BofA is the Devil, then Citibank is the anti-Christ. I’ve had my money with Citibank since my wife and I started saving for our wedding, it’s been about 2 years now. I haven’t really had a problem with them, but we’ve made sure never to let our account get close to zero or god-forbid, overdraft anything. Everyone I’ve ever spoken to though has nothing positive to say about them, except that they are everywhere. Opening an account in Los Angeles was very frustrating as their bank people are morons for the most part. Between spelling my wife’s name wrong on her debit card and then not shipping the card at all, they scored major idiot points with us.

4. Washington Mutual

I banked with them for a while, but WaMu plays themselves off as the anti-bank, the bank that has free checking, that cares about its customers and so on. However, as shown here, that’s not always true. Reality is, they’re a business just like everyone else. Their free checking isn’t necessarily free, they used to offer a program that would allow customers a $500 negative balance on their account (complete with fees of course) and other items that seem great but turn out to be very dangerous. Washington Mutual does offer a favorable savings account interest rate however, but unlike HSBC you need to have a checking account lined to your savings account. Otherwise it’s no good.

5. Wachovia

Beyond the fact that this bank’s name is unpronounceable, its 50/50. Not everyone is happy with them, and their branch and ATM locations are spotty, but they seem to get the job done and at least they aren’t BofA. I recently opened a Wachovia checking account to link with my Paypal account so I can transfer money. We’ll see how easy they are to work with. I hate their website, but opening the account was easy enough.

6. JP Morgan Chase

On a recent Marketwatch.com survey, Chase was second only to BofA in complaints. Their lack of responsiveness is terrible, and although I’ve heard some good things about their savings account interest rates, they don’t satisfy their customers at all.

7. HSBC

We have a savings account with this bank, which we started online. There’s no checking account necessary, and while they don’t pretend to be the friendliest bank, they seem to have the online banking thing mastered. Their complaint rate seems to be the middle of the road, and everyone who looks into their online savings account seems really enthusiastic about it.

Here are some basic banking tips:

1. Banks are a business

They aren’t going to take care of you, they not only want to hold onto your money, but they want to take it for their own. Be prepared to fight with them and get everything from them that you can.

2. Large Banks Suck

Whether it’s WaMu, BofA or whatever, they’re terrible. They outsource customer service overseas, they are impossible to talk to, they mismanage your accounts and in the end the guys who run the bank only care about stock prices and dividends, not your happiness.

There’s a wonderful episode of the show “The Office” where two characters (Dwight and Jim) show a business owner how bad the big company’s customer service is. That being said, credit unions are local and are limited in their abilities. Keep all that in mind when banking with them.

Here are the Top 5 Do’s and Do Not’s that will help free up cash to create a bigger savings account:

Do’s

1. Do use your 401k at work. The biggest mistake people make in getting themselves in trouble is trading the future for today. Surveys show that $50 saved today is worth hundreds if not thousands in forty or fifty years. If you want to be able to eat something other than tuna fish when you’re 75, find out what kind of 401k plan your company has and invest as much as you can.

2. Do call a financial planner. Sure, budgeting and balancing your checkbook are helpful, but mechanics are for cars, plumbers are for pipes and financial planners are for finances. Bring in an expert, paying someone $200 now could save you thousands and year, and make you even more over the course of your lifetime.

3. Do increase your financial IQ. No more rolling your eyes at the stock market report, no more skipping the business section of the paper to get to sports, no more passing up financial tips websites. Take a class, bring your significant other along, read about personal finances, learn about stocks, ask as many questions as possible. Educated investors make better decisions and are less apt to fall for scams and bad deals.

4. Do use coupons. Okay, pride, ego and vanity murder your budget. Wanting to shop for brands so your shirt’s tag shows who you are is the perfect way to ruin your credit, run up debt and end all chance at getting some breathing room before you retire. Use coupons at the grocery store, shop for clothes you need when they’re on sale, shop at discount stores for items people won’t see (socks, underwear, napkins, etc.) and save splurges for only certain times of year or certain stores.

5. Do save. Budget your savings, treat it like a bill. Start a separate account so you can write a check to your savings account. Do what you can to create a culture of savings in your life, tear yourself away from the idea that new appliances and technology show your wealth. Wealth is measured over time, not over how many channels you don’t watch at home.

Do Not’s

1. Do not go to Starbucks. There was a time, and this may seem strange, when spending $8 on coffee and a pastry was idiotic, that time was 1995. $8 a day for work is $40 a week, that’s $2,000 a year on coffee and scones! Put that into a 401k, and without any interest at all, that would be $40,000 in twenty years.

2. Do not ignore your bills. They scare you don’t they? Yeah, they scare all of us. But, if you ignore them they only get worse. Open them, read them, pay them. Even if you can’t pay the full amount on a credit card bill, it’s better to pay a little bit and at least build a relationship with the credit card company which you can leverage in the future.

3. Do not buy ten DVD’s a week. This sort of goes with the Starbucks point, but Americans spend so much money on movies that sit on their shelves, music that sits on their shelves, channels they don’t watch, technology they don’t use, etc. Status is your enemy, not your friend. Don’t use status to measure wealth, use freedom. Are you free enough to quit your job and not work for two years? No? Then you’re not wealthy.

4. Do not eat out. Eating lunch out could cost you $3,000 - $5,000 a year, on top of your food bill. This is especially true in urban centers that have lunch places with high rents such as Manhattan, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston or Miami. Your $9 sandwich and $3 soda pays their electric bill and drains your wallet. Let them take someone else’s money, try bringing a sandwich four times a week and eat out on Friday’s with co-workers.

5. Do not procrastinate. It’s March, 2008. How many months have gone by since the last time you wanted to fix your finances? That’s thousands of dollars lost in interest alone. Buy a book, take a seminar, meeting with your banker or financial planner, but do something to fix your finances, and do it quick! Time is of the essence, in fact time is the one thing that will always run out no matter who you are, so make the most of it.