If you walk around acting like you’re worth a million bucks, will it get you ahead in life?

According to Steve Pavlina and his very popular blog, part of becoming wealthy is in your mindset. And he takes this quite literally — walking around with $400 in your wallet or purse will make you feel like you have plenty of money. If you feel like you have plenty of money, you probably won’t be making a big deal out of things that don’t really matter much anyway — like not ordering the most expensive thing on lunch menu to save a whopping $2. That $2 won’t matter much whether you’re rich or poor, so you might as well just order what you really wanted to eat.

He’s not advocating spending money with abandon, of course — rich people don’t do that. They’re usually thinking about how they can spend their money wisely to get it to generate more money for them. He might be onto something here — when you’re feeling like you don’t have much money, you’re concentrating on saving a dollar (or a few cents at the grocery store) here and there. If you feel like money is plentiful, you’re looking to create more of it — ultimately more lucrative. You can only shave so much off your cost of living — but you can increase your income without any limit.

However, being a person who normally has $20 or less in my wallet (I live by the credit card - 1% back!), I feel like $400 is a bit of a jump for me. I took out $100 last time I went to the ATM.

Am I rich yet? No. But I didn’t think twice about spending $5.00 on a soda at the football game today. Plenty of cash to go around.