Hip Hop Serving Up Plan for Failure

Hip Hop Serving Up Plan for Failure
Black Youth Need to Break Free of Prison Culture
By JASON WHITLOCK
AOL
Sports Commentary

What to do? That's the only thing left to ponder now that the hot mess that was NBA All-Star Weekend has left us with no choice but to deal with a problem that has been fomenting for 20 years.

Prison culture swallowed hip-hop culture, turning party music into a celebration of violence, hostility, disrespect and drug-dealing.

Prison culture created the Black KKK and negated much of the progress won by the civil-rights movement.

We can no longer afford to live in denial of these realities, and we must formulate a game plan to combat the self-destructive culture that is influencing too many young black men and women.

I offer no apologies for putting these issues on the table publicly. If anything, I apologize for waiting too long.

Prison culture is winning. It has corrupted a form of music that once gave us great joy and/or offered inspiration. Prison culture -- with its BET and MTV videos, popular movies, acceptance in the mainstream media and false gods -- Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg -- has perverted the American dream for black youth.

The blueprint for black success painted by pop culture and the mainstream media goes something like this:

Step 1: Four to five years posted up on the block building a small drug-dealing empire.

Step 2: Three to four years shuffling in and out of prison on drug-trafficking charges.

Step 3: Write and perform rap songs about dealing drugs, killing niggas, running from the police and bad-mouthing black women.

Step 4: Sign with a major record label that is anxious to make money off prison culture.

Step 5: Start your own record label and find other drug-dealers-turned-rappers or
wannabe-drug-dealers-turned-rappers to exploit.

Step 6: Buy a small percentage of a pro sports franchise, run around with NBA and NFL players and allow black and white members of the mainstream media to kiss your pinkie ring.

What to do about all of this?

Hip-hop/prison culture must be destroyed and remade. In its present, N-word-reliant, violence-promoting form, nothing good can come from hip hop. Just like the prison system, hip hop's popular music is another vehicle to imprison the minds and bodies of the youth who devour it.

Our children think they're participating in a culture that is meant to empower them. Hip hop -- disguised in low-hanging platinum chains, 24-inch rims, platinum grills and other flossy material possessions -- cripples black youth and infects them with a prison mindset that even NFL and NBA dollars can't seem to shake.

I don't hate hip hop. I hate what it has become. I hate what it has done to the minds and values of young people.

You think you're going to be the next Jay-Z. The reality is if you follow the principles celebrated in hip hop, you're far more likely to be the next Tookie Williams. Big Tigger and other hip hop groupies won't tell you that.

Hip hop is filled with hostility and disrespect, the tools needed to survive while incarcerated. Hip hop cares little about family and knows nothing of the rewards of parenting. You don't parent in prison; you baby-daddy in prison. Hip hop judges love by your willingness to embrace evil -- ride (kill) or die.

Just like the Ebonics language, the tattoos and cornrows are straight from the prison playbook. So are the sagging pants, which started as a way for gay prisoners to signal their availability for action.

The rappers love to tell you they're keeping it real, but they leave out so much to the hip hip/prison culture story. "Gangbanging" and being a "rider" is glorified. They don't tell you that much of the violence played out on the streets is directly related to the love affairs that play out behind bars.

You've heard that there's a thin line between love and hate. Well, when two people lay down, at least one person is getting up with feelings. It's easy for those feelings to turn hard and lethal when one person is forced to lie down.

But they don't rap about that. They don't tell you what's at the foundation of the most self-destructive culture in American history.

Prison values are being popularized through hip hop. Men who don't expect to or care whether they live past age 30 are passing on their values to kids. That's why hip hop is an instant-gratification movement. The civil-rights movement took a long-term approach; it was about sacrificing for the next generation.

America, with its repressive drug laws and get-tough-on-non-violent-crime political maneuvering, has incarcerated 25 percent of the black men from the "next generation."

Art is often born from pain. Should we be surprised that a culture has been born from the pain of black incarceration?

A white critic of my All-Star columns, Dave Zirin, asked me Monday: "If black men weren't in prison, don't you think they'd rap about something else?"

It was a great question. What came first, the explosion of American prison building or the explosion of gangsta rap? California, Ronald Reagan's state, was at the forefront of both explosions. They're both byproducts of the war on drugs.

They all need to stop -- gangsta rap, prison building and the fruitless war on drugs.

We need to reject prison culture. Take it off our black-owned radio stations, BET and MTV. Refuse to support it at movie theatres. Make Kanye West pay a price for telling black kids they're stupid for pursuing an education. (To give you an indication of how screwed up things are, Time Magazine put Kanye on its cover and hailed him a genius.)

And we need to fight for sweeping reforms to America's drug laws. We probably need to legalize recreational drugs and eliminate drug dealing as an extremely lucrative occupation. If it was legal, there would be less violence associated with the sale of drugs. If it was legal, there would certainly be far fewer non-violent drug users headed to Black KKK laboratories/prisons.

There also needs to be serious prison reform. We have this lust to see criminals severely punished. We seem to take delight in the fact that they brutalize each other while incarcerated. We want them thrown in the hole, denied the right to education.

We want them caged up like animals, and then we wonder why they act like animals when their mandatory-minimum sentences run out and they're set free to rejoin society. These black and brown, formerly non-violent offenders don't come home to our lawmakers' neighborhoods. They don't attend the same parties or frequent the same nightclubs as our lawmakers. They don't join Joe Biden's posse.

We have to deal with them. They're family. They're cousins, uncles, nephews, best friends from fifth grade. Ideally they need to come home to us more civilized than when they left. At the very least, we can't build prisons that specialize in manufacturing predators.

Our drug laws snatch them. Our prisons rape them of whatever humanity they had. And hip hop culture installs them as role models. The whole vicious cycle needs to be blown up or we're going to lose the next-next generation at an even more alarming rate than the previous one.

Millionaires in the Making: The Marchbanks

Millionaires in the Making: The Marchbanks
Matt and Lori have managed to build $300,000 together just a few years out of college, and not by cutting back on life's pleasures.
By Rob Kelley, CNNMoney.com staff writer
September 21 2006: 3:07 PM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- If the idea of saving away 25 percent of your paycheck makes you think of a severely cramped lifestyle, meet the Marchbanks of Dallas, Texas.

Matt, who works on real estate and small business lending at a commercial bank, and Lori, an accountant, have a shared financial philosophy that lets them spend confidently - and save diligently.

The couple met in high school and dated throughout college at Texas A&M, marrying two weeks after their 2000 graduation. Now, at the ages of 28 and 27, Matt and Lori have over $300,000 in assets.

"We were both fortunate to get great jobs out of school," says Matt. "Our parents paid for college so we didn't start with any debt."
How they save

The Marchbanks take home a combined salary of $145,000, plus annual bonuses of around $40,000. But a good salary doesn't always mean good savings. With mortgage payments on a beautiful 2000-sq.-foot home, and a confessed preference for nice cars, how does the couple save as much as they do?

"We share a philosophy: we can afford a lot more, but we choose to pay ourselves first," he says. "When we're 55, we want to be the ones to decide if we continue working, or take part-time jobs or just travel. Nothing beats saving when you're young so you can get ahead with the power of compound interest."

Accordingly, Matt and Lori set aside just over 25 percent of their income each month. They both max out their 401(k)s at work, taking advantage of company matches. Each year they have put the maximum possible into their Roth IRAs before hitting the government's income limit last year.

Beyond that, they don't really operate with a strict budget - more like strict values.

They pay off credit cards every month, so their only debt is their mortgage, and Matt says interest rates are a major concern of theirs.

He says he learned his good financial habits from his father, an insurance salesman, and mother, a school teacher.

The couple has over $100,000 in their combined 401(k)s, and $50,000 in Roth IRAs. They have around $100,000 in cash in savings accounts, and $40,000 in home equity.

Matt says the large cash holding is eventually going to be invested - he'd prefer to have only 25 percent in cash as an emergency fund. But he's currently interviewing different investment advisers before putting the bulk of the cash into the market.
How they spend

One of Matt's big indulgences is his golf game, but he often gets to play while entertaining bank clients.

Matt also views negotiating prices as a crucial skill in his financial repertoire. "I almost never take the first price on anything, whether it's haggling or asking for discounts," he says. "I do a lot of negotiating in my job, so I'm more comfortable with it than many people. I'll never pay sticker price for a car, for instance, because to me there's always wiggle room."

Cars are one purchase that Matt feels especially strong about.

"I drive about 25,000 miles a year so I want to drive something I like," he says. "We definitely splurge a little there."

In purchasing Lori's car, one of the couple's biggest expenditures, he negotiated a price below the invoice and a very low interest rate.

Her '05 Acura TL is the only car the couple has bought new. Matt drives a used vehicle - an '03 Infiniti G35 that he bought with low mileage.
The future

What's ahead for the penny-conscious couple? A child, and perhaps a new home.

"We'd like for Lori to stay home for quite a while after the first child, and maybe not go back to work full-time," he says. He says that there is a lot of flexible work in her field, accounting, and that will give the couple more options after they have children.

"I don't expect to be able to save as much after that - maybe just 10 to 15 percent - but that will be fine," he says.

Matt says a new home may be in the works if their current place begins to feel small for a family of three.

"We're definitely thinking about upgrading in the next two to three years, but it all depends on whether interest rates are favorable," he says. "I've got a 5.25 percent rate for 30 years right now."

He'd also like to add some real estate to the family's portfolio, purchasing some land or rentals.

Despite some major financial burdens ahead, don't expect the Marchbanks to give up their saving ways.

"We're really not penny-pinchers," says Matt. "I think we just really think over our financial decisions. We have a strong common focus that moves us toward our goal."

Emmitt Smith: Cowboy, dancer, real estate tycoon

Emmitt Smith: Cowboy, dancer, real estate tycoon
Emmitt Smith has covered a lot of real estate on the football field and the dance floor. Now he's developing it, says Fortune's Roy Johnson.
FORTUNE Magazine
By Roy S. Johnson, Fortune
February 1 2007: 5:53 AM EST

(Fortune Magazine) -- On a chilly winter day in Dallas, the most prolific running back in National Football League history is being tackled at every turn. As Emmitt Smith climbs into his silver Hummer and heads to lunch, a young woman pulls alongside, powers open her passenger-side window, and, with a syrupy Texas drawl, yells, "I'm soooo proud of you." Minutes later in the restaurant, women of all ages greet him like a favorite son, and men shake his hand with Texas pride.

But none of this adulation has a thing to do with the many highlights Smith produced as a member of the Dallas Cowboys during his 15-year, sure-to-be-Hall-of-Fame career. "You sure did do some dancin'!" bellows one barrel-chested fellow in the oil business. Smith flashes that familiar killer smile and thanks the man, just as he does every well-wisher. Finally sitting down, he can only shake his head. "This is nothing," he says. "The ballroom dancing crowd? They're out of control."


CAREER STATS
255
Smith's highest value to fantasy football players, during the 1995 season.
175
Touchdown balls Smith collected during his career. Many have been donated to charity.
27 million
Viewers for "Dancing With the Stars" finale.

Being celebrated more for tango than for touchdowns isn't exactly how Smith, 37, envisioned life after pro football. But that's what happens when you win one of television's most popular reality-show competitions, ABC's "Dancing With the Stars." Smith tapped and twirled his way to the surprise victory last fall, which only broadened his circle of admirers. "No one expected me to be able to move around on the dance floor," Smith says proudly, "including my wife."
A new ambition

But if you run into Smith these days, don't ask him to dance. His sights are now set on his true post-career ambition, one he has held for many years: becoming a real estate tycoon.

In rushing for an NFL-record 18,355 yards with Dallas and the Arizona Cardinals, Smith covered a lot of real estate. He also invested in the sector, and he has profited by buying and selling properties in and around Dallas and his hometown, Pensacola, Fla., since he was a rookie.

Last year Smith made his first move toward becoming a developer. He teamed with another Cowboy legend, Roger Staubach, the founder and CEO of Staubach Co., to form Smith/Cypress Partners LP, a real estate development enterprise specializing in transforming underutilized parcels in densely populated areas into commercially viable properties anchored by national retail giants.
An ex-ball player slides into stocks

In his first deal, Smith helped the firm sign Mervyn's, a California-based department store chain, to anchor a $45 million, 230,000-square-foot project in Phoenix, where he last played for the Cardinals two seasons ago.

With access to $50 million in capital, Smith has several other projects in the works. He has a letter of intent to develop a 65-acre site in a densely populated yet underserved area near northwest Fort Worth (it was formerly a college operated by a Masonic lodge), and he's haggling over another potential project in southeast Fort Worth.

On one of the sites, Smith plans to build a complex with as much as 600,000 square feet of retail space, more than double the size of the Phoenix property. "There's a huge need for top-quality retail in these areas, and I understand how the deals are cut," Smith said before lunch. "I'm not an engineer. I'm not a contractor. And I'm still learning the jargon. But I understand deals, and the only way to grow is to be in the middle of the deals."

If you're thinking Smith is following the path laid by former NBA star Earvin "Magic" Johnson, whose Magic Johnson Enterprises has built movie theaters, restaurants and Starbucks franchises in urban areas, you're partly correct. Smith aims for Johnson's entrepreneurial success but is not restricting his projects to the inner city. "I love what Magic's doing," Smith says. "He's inspired all athletes to pursue successful business careers. But I'm not confining myself to urban areas. If there are rural areas with economic potential, I'm right there."

Smith/Cypress is a joint venture (Smith owns 51 percent) with Cypress Equities, the retail development arm of Staubach's real estate services company. Early in his own playing career, Smith approached the former Cowboy quarterback with an interest in learning more about real estate. Skeptical at first, Staubach told Smith to spend some time at his company's offices during the spring and summer if he was sincere.

"I was 27 with three kids when I was a rookie," Staubach says, sitting in an office with nary a trinket that would tell you its inhabitant is an NFL icon. "My motivation to work during the off-season was to make sure that if I got hurt I could take care of my kids. Today's athletes make so much money they don't have to work. You've got to pay the price to get anything in life."

Smith did just that, spending the off-season at Staubach Co.'s headquarters in Dallas. Staubach founded the company almost 30 years ago to locate and negotiate office and retail space for clients. Last year the privately held firm had transactions totaling $26 billion and 835 million square feet of space.

Just over a decade ago, Staubach launched Cypress Equities because clients were also looking for build-to-suit and other development services. "We were leaving money on the table," Staubach says. Today Staubach Co. has offices in 65 cities around the world, many of them joint ventures with local owners.

Smith typically arrives in his office just down the hall before 9 A.M., but he convinced Staubach long ago that he brings more than star power to the job. "He has the leadership skills to build a real business," Staubach says. "Someday he may come in here and say 'I'm buying you guys out.'"

Staubach says it was important to him that Smith be the majority owner of the entity, and not just because the venture would thus be able to bid for projects as a minority-owned enterprise. "We've got a wonderful country, but we have a disease that's cancer: It's discrimination. There are some positive things happening in business today for minorities, some real opportunities. But not enough. The idea of a minority-owned business was appealing to Emmitt, and it was especially appealing to me."

Smith's interest in real estate began during his days in Pop Warner football in Pensacola, when he sometimes stayed at the home of his coach the night before a game. The 3,500-square-foot house was no mansion, but it was enough to impress a young man who lived in a public housing project, the Courts, with his mother and four siblings.

The coach owned a small construction firm, and he began to teach Smith how to use drawing boards and read floor plans. Smith was enthralled by the thought of a profession that might let him move his family into a home similar to his coach's.

When he went to the University of Florida, Smith wanted to major in architecture. But as sometimes happens to student athletes, a university advisor persuaded him to sign up for a less rigorous major, public recreation, instead.

"It made sense at the time because it looked like I was going to leave after my junior year, and they said it was something that would be easier for me to come back and finish at a later time," says Smith. The future eight-time Pro Bowler did leave school after his third year, and was selected in the first round of the 1990 NFL draft. Six years later he obtained his degree.

Smith was pondering the endgame of his career while other young players were still discussing their next extravagant purchase. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who made his own fortune (estimated to be about $1 billion, give or take) in real estate, recalls Smith approaching him early during the player's career with a unique request: Could he observe Jones "doing business" in order to see how a successful entrepreneur conducted himself?

"During breaks in practice he'd sit on a couch in my office and just watch me talk on the phone," Jones recalls. "He was soaking it all up and figuring out ways he could put what he heard to work." Jones says Smith's request reminded him of, well, himself, when as a young man he traveled to the now defunct American Football League meetings and sat in the lobby in hopes he'd "brush into" Lamar Hunt, one of the league's founders (who died in December). "I was 23, 24 years old and was starting to think the opportunity to get into pro football had passed me by. But you've got to have the vision. More than any player I've had, Emmitt has always had a vision."

Smith recalls another encounter with Jones in which he wrote down a list of all the goals he wanted the owner to help him achieve. He handed the list to Jones and asked him to check the ones he thought were doable. "He looked at the list and checked every one," Smith recalls. "He said, 'We'll get to some of these now, and some of these later, but we'll get to all of them.' I'll always appreciate that."

Smith still walks with the swagger of a successful athlete. Yet he is fully aware that he's a rookie in this arena. Smith/Cypress's day-to-day operations are handled by Cypress Equities CEO Chris Maguire, who built the retail entity that now supports Smith with research, financing and economic projections.

Maguire confirms that Smith's value, even at this nascent stage of his new career, goes beyond a high recognition factor and popularity that opens doors. "He's a smart guy," Maguire says. "He has a sense for knowing when to push buttons and when to sit back. And when he speaks, he's like E.F. Hutton: People listen."

As he drives back to the office from lunch, Smith spies an empty retail "box" on a prominent corner. His eyes light up, as I'm sure they did when he saw an opening wedged by his offensive line. He likes its location, its visibility. And he has a client for whom it just might be perfect.

"My job," he says as he turns the corner, "is to work as hard as I can to maximize the gifts I've been blessed with, whether physical, mental or otherwise. I've worked hard to maximize my physical gifts - even on the dance floor. Now my focus is on maximizing my other gifts to the fullest possible extent."

Quickly, the big silver Hummer turns the corner and speeds away, its driver eager to get in the middle of yet another deal.

Millionaires in the Making: The Johnsons

Millionaires in the Making: The Johnsons
Matt says he's squandered his money on cars and even a tattoo. But with wife Kristina's discipline, the couple is on their way to financial security.
By Rob Kelley, CNNMoney.com staff writer
October 12 2006: 9:51 AM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Matt Johnson can remember a time when he was barely in control of his money, let alone in command of it.

"At one point in college I spent my last $80 on a tattoo," Matt said. "It just seemed like a great thing to buy at the time."
Matt Johnson was in the habit of buying a brand new car every two years before he met wife Kristina.
Matt Johnson was in the habit of buying a brand new car every two years before he met wife Kristina.

He was also in the habit of buying a brand new car every two years, going through four cars between 1997 and 2003.

"But Kristina has really helped me change because she approaches money in such an organized way," he said.

Matt met future wife Kristina in their sophomore year at Maryland's Villa Julie College, and they got engaged soon after graduation in 1998. Kristina was an accounting major, and applied some fiscal discipline to Matt's previously free-spending ways.

Now married, Kristina takes care of all the budgeting and bills, and Matt handles the investing.

"We rein each other in," said Matt. "I have a thing for cars, and she has a weakness for shoes and clothes. But we do a good job of keeping each other grounded."

"I don't think we've ever had a serious argument about money," he said. "Well, maybe once we had to have a talk about cars."

The couple has also managed to stash away $200,000 and built up over $120,000 in home equity - and they're both just 30 years old.
How they save

It doesn't hurt that Matt and Kristina take home a combined $147,000 a year - but that alone doesn't keep their finances in good shape.

"We're big believers in doing paycheck deductions - don't even let that savings money into your bank account," said Matt. "It's the whole idea of not even seeing the money."

They both began contributing to their 401(k)s as soon as they began working. Matt became well-acquainted with the culture of saving while working in the 401(k) division at T. Rowe Price as a communications consultant. And Kristina built her budgeting skills while working as an accountant, spending five years doing auditing work for Bank of America.

Currently, Matt puts 10 percent of his income towards his 401(k) - with a plan of increasing his contribution one percentage point each year - and Kristina contributes five percent at her current job at Bay National Bank.

They're still trying to figure out how to invest $65,000 that they have in cash. Some of it they are slating for home improvements on their new home in Parkton, north of Baltimore, and some will go towards a diversified investment portfolio.

And they've kept their regular expenses to a minimum, starting off their marriage living in an affordable apartment while looking for a townhouse. Rather than renew the lease, the couple moved in with Kristina's parents for several months while they continued the home search. ("We probably wouldn't repeat that decision," said an older and wiser Matt.)

He describes Kristina as a "total coupon freak," and says the couple save 15 to 20 percent off their grocery bills most weeks.

With the birth of Nicholas earlier this year, the couple put $1,000 into a 529 college savings, and decided to allot one percent of Matt's paycheck this year, with a plan to increase that amount each year.

Both of their jobs offer annual bonuses, but the couple are putting those toward paying off their mortgage.
How they spend

Kristina says the adjustment between Matt's formerly free-spending ways and her budget-balancing accountant side wasn't as hard as it might seem.

"We didn't live together before we got married, so we definitely went through an adjustment period," said Kristina. "But we agreed when we got married that we didn't want to live life extravagantly, although we do enjoy traveling and going out to dinner with friends sometimes."

When the couple jumped and bought a townhouse near Baltimore in 2000, they made sure they weren't maxing out their budget.

"We paid $156,000 for the house - which felt like a lot of money at the time - but then we sold it in 2005 for $308,000," said Matt. "It's the best investment we didn't know we were making."

They found their new house one year ago, while Kristina was several months pregnant. They were just casually looking for homes, sending pictures back and forth online, waiting for the right combination of house, neighborhood and school system.

When Matt found it, the couple made the biggest long-term investment of their life, putting $50,000 down on it and took out a mortgage for $500,000.

They are currently paying about $3200 a month, but are hoping to pay the mortgage down as quickly as possible by steps like applying their bonuses to it.

"Had we not been as fiscally conservative over the years, there's no way we would've been able to do this," said Matt. "We did sell high, but we also had to buy high."

The couple also kept credit card expenditures to a minimum, while not forsaking plastic completely. "We've never paid a finance fee on a credit card," said Kristina.

They do put cards to work for them, however. "We use a Marriott credit card, and we haven't paid for a hotel room in five years," said Matt. "We're going to Las Vegas in early November, and we're doing it on my flight points and her hotel points."

And to satisfy their travel itch, they've vacationed in Italy, Hawaii, Mexico and England.

Matt's car habit has been happily curtailed, and he professes happiness at driving (and frequently sharing) a 2003 Toyota Highlander that they bought new. And Kristina drives a '98 Acura Integra. The cars are completely paid off.

When Kristina returned to work after giving birth to Nicholas, the couple also confronted the reality of day-care payments, to the tune of $1,000 a month.

"It's definitely worth the flexibility, but it does hurt the pocketbook," said Matt. "But the provider is top-notch and we knew if we were going to spend the money, we were going to do it right."
The future

The future is full of options for the couple, and that's just the way they've planned it.

Both of them want to keep indulging their passion for travel, and Kristina is thinking about opening her own business some day.

"I used to dance ballet, and someday I'd love to open my own dance studio," she said.

With all the details of their financial life, it's baby Nicholas that's taking their attention now. "Having the baby around, you definitely refocus what you spend money on, and how you want to spend your life," said Kristina. "We're thinking about money, but also about finding time for Matt and I to just hang out."

Millionaire in the making: Sherelle Derico

Millionaire in the making: Sherelle Derico
Single mother sacrifices, then savors, prosperous course for herself and her daughter.
By Christian Zappone, CNNMoney.com staff writer
January 25 2007: 9:48 AM EST

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Sherelle Derico, 36, had a three-week-old daughter and no job when she and her husband split in 1996. But the challenges of the separation and single motherhood didn't deter her from seeking financial success.

At the time of her divorce Derico, who held an accounting degree, was already considering earning a master's degree.

"As soon as the baby turned one I started on a Masters in Financial Management at the University of Maryland," she said.

The period brought changes not just in her educational and career goals but in her spending habits, too. Derico, who enjoys interior design, says she used to spend a lot of money on clothes and furniture. She used to travel more.

Today, she prefers to pay off debt and to save money down to the penny. When this journalist contacted Derico on her cell phone, one of the first things she asked is, "Can you call me back on my land line? I want to save on my minutes."

Derico's personal history helps explain her habits. After becoming a mother and getting divorced she returned to a former employer who hired her back - for a lower-paying job. Then 9/11 happened, and she got laid off.

"I found myself in lots of debt. That's when I started to save a lot of money," said Derico, who now works as senior consultant in project management for Booz Allen Hamilton in the Washington, D.C., area.
25 rules to grow rich by

Derico has paid off roughly $25,000 in student debt, personal loans, and credit cards debt she racked up in 10 years. She paid for her master's degree mostly in cash along with matching plans from her employers.

Also, five years ago she started receiving a small amount of child support which is now $700 a month.

As for her own money, Derico puts 20 percent of her income into her 401(k) and IRA.

She says she's adamant about paying into her savings like she would any other bill.

She has $95,000 in an account with TIAA-CREF. Her Booz Allen 401(k) account has $36,000. She keeps about $8,000 in her regular savings.

"My friends say I'm pretty obsessive [about my savings]," Derico says, pointing out that she 'loses it' if her savings fall below a certain amount.
Buying a home

Although Derico faced lean times, she has managed to set and keep financial goals - like homeownership.

But Derico's 1999 purchase of the four-bedroom, two-bath, 1,300 sq. foot Fairfax, Virginia, town home didn't come without sacrifice.

She was enrolled in her master's program at the time and had to ask for a refund on that semester's tuition in order to come up with the down payment for the house.

To scrimp for the rest of the payment, she says she didn't go to the grocery store for three months and instead ate only the food she had stockpiled in her pantry.

"The majority was canned food," she said. "Spam. Ramen noodles soup."

But her daughter Sharmon didn't mind. Sharmon, who was 4 years old at the time, wanted to be able to jump; living in an apartment with neighbors in the unit below meant she couldn't.

Derico succeeded in making the down payment and took out a 30-year mortgage on the $114,000 home.

Not long after, she refinanced and brought the length of the mortgage down to 15 years.
More Millionaires in the Making

The value of the property has soared in Fairfax County's overheated real estate market. Similar homes in the area sell for $500,000-$600,000.

Derico has racked up $460,000 in equity in the town home.

She wants to pay off the mortgage in 10 years, which would mean she would own the home outright by 2009.

She points out that "any extra money goes towards [her] mortgage."

Although Derico still sacrifices today, she no longer has to buy ramen.
Money handling

Today her one indulgence is a new 2007 LS460 Lexus. She bought it after paying off her 1996 ES300 Lexus. She financed the new car through her credit union.

Derico has no credit cards and pays for everything in cash with the exception of her Lexus. If she can't use cash, she uses a debit card. She also uses coupons and savings cards when eating out and for groceries and toiletries.

She eats turkey sandwiches every day at work and never eats out during the week. Her entertainment/dining out budget is $100. For the month.

One trick that has helped Derico, who still confesses to a weakness for impulse buys, is to save money in her ING money market account. Once you contribute money to it, you can't touch it for two or three days, which she says prevents spur-of-the-moment purchases.

In terms of stretching dollars, "my friends try to figure out how I do so much on my little income. I've been called a penny-pincher, a thrift-saver, a cheapskate."

Derico says she learned little about financial management from her parents. Instead, her money education came from financial literacy lessons she took at her church.

She wants to pass those lessons on to her daughter.

Sharmon doesn't get a fixed allowance, but Sherelle makes sure she always has some money on hand. Sherelle expects her daughter to save at least 10 percent of the money. As an incentive, at the end of each month, Sherelle matches whatever Sharmon takes to the bank. Including change.

Sherelle then shows Sharmon what's going into her account every month and how much her money has grown.

"My friends say [Sharmon] knows a lot more about finances than they do now," Sherelle says, noting, "she understands credit cards aren't a good thing."

Sherelle does the same with the 529 education plan she opened up for her daughter last year, which so far has more than $3,000 in it.

And finally, Sherelle has Sharmon tithe 10 percent to the church, as Sherelle does when not contributing to the renovation of her grandmother's 30-year-old house.
Future plans

Since Derico is on track to be debt-free in five years, including her mortgage, her prospects of a comfortable retirement are substantially raised.

She says she would like to retire from her current profession one day and move back to her home state of Georgia to teach financial literacy in the schools there. She'd also consider working part time.

She toys with the idea of starting an interior design business if it didn't mean going back to school. Sharmon, now 11, would one day like to be a graphic designer.

With the financial lessons applied to her own life, Sherelle Derico says she doesn't understand people who don't pay attention to their money. "It's nothing you can ignore," she said.

She marvels at people who can't make their finances work while they're employed, because if they can't succeed now that they're making an income how will they survive when they're not working?

"You can finance everything else," said Derico. "But retirement is the one thing that can't be financed."

The Martins: Millionaires in the Making

The Martins: Millionaires in the Making
Jeff and Jet enjoy the world while planning for the future.
By Christian Zappone, CNNMoney.com staff writer
December 26 2006: 5:17 PM EST

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - For most of us retirement comes at the end of our career. But for Jeff Martin, 34, retirement from the Army is just over the horizon. Martin is five years away from being able to leave the Army with a pension of half his current monthly income, which today is $4,256.

Jeff, a native of Carrollton, Ohio, joined the Army out of high school in 1990 and has been promoted up to the rank of Warrant Officer. He works as a Legal Administrator, similar to a law office manager in the civilian world.
budapest.03.jpg
The Martins on vacation in Budapest.

His wife Getriz Martin, 31, who goes by the name Jet, just started work as a civilian nurse in a position the couple expects to gross $5,500 per month. Jet takes home an additional $300 per month as an Army Reservist.

Now stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, the couple has lived around the country and the world, including Washington DC, Georgia, Korea, Kansas City - Jet's hometown where the couple met - Colorado, Italy and Washington State. Jeff also served in Afghanistan while stationed in Europe.

Jeff is not sure what line of work he'd like to pursue when he leaves the Army. He could even reenlist. But he and Jet talk about the possibility of retiring in their 50s.

They have amassed $240,000 in savings and investments, taking advantage of plans offered to members of the armed services. "I really enjoy the thrill of watching my money grow, sometimes ever so slowly, but knowing that I have been doing this for 15 years in the Army," said Jeff.

Real estate has also helped. They bought and lived in a house in Colorado Springs in 2002 when they were stationed there. They now rent it, with the help of a property manager. The $945 the couple takes in on rent, after the management fee, is actually less than the $1,243 the Martins pay on its monthly mortgage. "The difference in depreciation and interest eases our taxes," Jeff said.

The Martins are looking for another home in Washington State. In addition to Jeff's base salary, he receives $1,684 per month in the form of a tax-free housing allowance. "We try to leverage the housing allowance to the best of our ability."
Taking advantage of benefits

Both husband and wife have taken advantage of the education funding offered by allowing the Army to pay for 75% of their tuition. Jeff got his BS in Management and his Masters in Computer Resources and Information Management. Jet is attending classes part time to get her Bachelors of Science in Nursing.

Another advantage the Martins enjoy is the Thrift Savings Plan, a benefit offered to government employees and military members. The plan works like a simplified, government run 401(k) that allows members to divert portions of their income into six types of mutual funds.

Jeff diverts 25% of his income into his TSP account nearly reaching the IRS cap of $15,000 a year. Military personnel aren't entitled to the same matching program civilian employees like Jet are. Since Jet worked as a nurse in a clinic while they were stationed in Italy, her TSP and vacation will carry over to the new job she's just begun at a hospital on base. The couple plans to max out Jet's TSP as well.
Enjoying life

Although the Martins are rigorous about their savings, they don't live a Spartan existence. They love to travel and vacationed in London, Paris, Prague and Budapest while they were stationed in Europe.

They own three cars. A 2000 Miata paid for in cash as a "bit of a reward to ourselves" that "gives us something fun for day trips on the weekends to the islands and coastal areas of Washington State." A 2005 Acura TL for which Jeff pays $1,000 a month and is on track to pay off by the end of the year - 2 years ahead of schedule. And he still owns the first car he ever bought new - a '96 Chevy Cavalier Z24.

"I feel good that we are making the right choices along the way to at least position ourselves for a retirement where we don't outlive our money."

Jeff is considering becoming a teacher or a financial planner after the military. In the course of his job, Jeff has occasion to speak with young privates who are just getting their first paycheck. Often, they have little financial sense, so Jeff offers them some pointers about saving and investing. "I enjoy seeing them get excited about saving and showing them that it doesn't take much if you start early."

"You should be able to have some fun with your money," Jeff says, especially since many soldiers today get deployed in highly stressful environments for long periods. At the same time, he believes people should "show some discipline and position [themselves] for a future that includes not working in your retirement years."

Jeff wants other soldiers to know "you can start as a private and by being patient and taking a disciplined approach you can save tremendous amounts of money over your career." After all, he did and the Martins will be enjoying it for years to come.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of the story stated Jeff Martin would receive a pension amounting to 50% of his current monthy income of $5,940. In fact, Martin's monthly income is $4,256 - he also receives $1,684 each month in housing allowance, but that amount is not included in the pension calculation.

For more Millionaires in the Making. Top of page

Blacks Rooting for Dungy, Smith Isn't Racism

Since the Colts and the Bears won the conference championships, I’ve repeatedly been asked by white friends why was it OK for black people to openly root for the two African-American coaches but white people would’ve been viewed as racist had they openly cheered for Bill Belichick and Sean Payton.

Isn’t this a divisive double-standard?

No. It’s no different from the tradition of white people taking a passionate interest in boxing whenever a Great White (American) Hope makes a semi-legitimate run at the heavyweight title. Does anyone remember how America and Sports Illustrated went gaga over Gerry Cooney?

Better yet, why do you think Sylvester Stallone has made a half-billion dollars off the fictional Rocky character? The myth of a Great White Boxing Hope sells as well as the real thing.

This is not racism. People have a natural desire to see people who look like them excel, especially in professions where they’ve traditionally been excluded or haven’t experienced much success. There was no reason for white America to take a special rooting interest in Belichick and Payton. White men had coached in the previous 40 Super Bowls and won 38. (Tom Flores, who is Hispanic, guided the Raiders to two titles.)

Black people rooted for Lovie and Tony because they wanted to see black football coaches prove they are just as skilled as their white counterparts. We knew it before the conference championships. We just wanted definitive proof.

We need that proof so that maybe doors can be opened at the major-college level and in professional football. America has made tremendous black-white racial progress, but there are still obstacles African-Americans face when trying to gain access to jobs with the highest responsibility.

At the college level, administrators fear that black coaches can’t socialize with big-money boosters. At the professional level, owners worry that black coaches will form stronger ties with their predominantly black players than ownership (Denny Green in Minnesota).

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Beyond the door opening, black people rooted for Dungy and Smith for symbolic reasons. Dungy and Smith are symbols that there is more opportunity in America than systematic racism.

Yes, there is.

I am not naïve. I’m well aware that racism is still a major problem. But America is hardest on the poor and uneducated – regardless of color.

Dungy and Smith offer strong proof that education, dignity, hard work and perseverance are kryptonite to institutional racism. That’s a message black people want sounded across America as too many young people embrace the hip hop notion that ill-gotten wealth, jewelry, 22-inch rims and a veneer of violent toughness is a shield against racism rather than a one-way ticket to a romantic getaway at a penal institution.

Dungy grew up middle class, the son of educators. Smith is from a far more humble beginning, growing up in a farming community in Texas and working since childhood.

Dungy was the Doogie Howser of coaching, landing an assistant-coaching position with the Pittsburgh Steelers at age 25. He was defensive coordinator of the Steelers at age 28. It took a little more than a decade – and a lot of media pressure -- for Dungy to land a head-coaching job with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Smith traveled the more traditional coaching route. He spent 15 years as a high school and college coach before getting a job on Dungy’s Tampa staff. He spent three years leading the Rams defense before securing the Bears job.

Dungy and Smith are high-profile examples of how to make it in this world. They relied on their faith. They remained humble. They treat their players with great respect. They don’t cuss or scream. Their composure under pressure is impeccable. They invested in each other. They don’t whine or make excuses.

If you took note of the way Dungy handled his son’s suicide, you can’t question the man’s courage or toughness.

Come on, it’s not difficult to imagine why black Americans view Dungy and Smith as heroes and are celebrating their Super Bowl success. For older African-Americans, Dungy and Smith rekindle memories of Jackie Robinson. For younger black folks, Dungy and Smith have laid a fabulous blueprint for navigating the American maze.

Yes, the blueprint has been out in the open for decades. But the spotlight had been taken off of it.

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On Wednesday I stood on radio row at the Super Bowl talking with sportswriter Bryan Burwell and former NFL star Cris Carter. A talk-radio host asked Carter would race quit being an issue in terms of NFL coaches once this Super Bowl was over.

Carter said no – not as long as 32 white men owned NFL franchises and were the decision-makers. The radio host was disappointed and a bit uncomfortable. He just wants race topics to go away.

I understand the sentiment. I also agree and disagree with Carter’s opinion. Race will remain a serious topic in America and in the sports world for the foreseeable future. But race will be less of an issue when it comes to NFL coaches because of Dungy and Smith.

In the NBA race isn’t a gigantic issue – it’s still an issue (black coaches get fired quicker) – for coaches because that league has employed numerous black coaches for a number of years. Over the next decade, I suspect the same will be true of the NFL.

The new battle will be in NFL front offices

Smith, Dungy remind us what is right in our land

By JASON WHITLOCK
McClatchy Newspapers

http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/sports/16522642.htm

INDIANAPOLIS — In the minutes after Peyton Manning answered his critics, Indianapolis advanced to the Super Bowl, and the Colts and Patriots completed a playoff classic, Tony Dungy said he didn’t want to talk about the overriding story of Super Bowl XLI.

Dungy, perhaps the classiest coach in professional sports, is right.

Today we should focus on the breathtaking comeback that Manning engineered, the wild ride the Patriots and Colts took us on and the joy football fans in Indianapolis must be feeling.

Indy’s 38-34 victory in the AFC championship is worth reliving and relishing. The Colts rallied from a 21-3 hole, two offensive linemen and one defensive lineman scored, and Manning and Tom Brady exchanged haymakers throughout the fourth quarter. It was Ali vs. Frazier, and the Colts landed the final blow, intercepting Brady at the Indy 35.

We should leave Tony Dungy vs. Lovie Smith in Super Bowl XLI for another day.

But I can’t do it. This is an historic moment in sports, a moment bigger than the game.

Two blacks, Dungy and Smith, will lead the teams in America’s biggest sporting event. No black coach has won a Super Bowl. No black coach had advanced to the Super Bowl. Now there are two in the same game.

This is significant, and it says something about America. Something that needs to be repeated and shouted from the rooftops.

America, while not perfect, is the land of opportunity.

We get so caught up in stating what’s wrong with America that we sometimes forget to talk about what’s right.

Dungy and Smith, the coach of the NFC champion Bears, prove that blacks can accomplish whatever they set their mind to in America.

Is racism still a problem in America? Yes.

But it’s inappropriate to tell kids that America is so governed by racism that a black man or woman can’t reach the highest level of professional success. Too many blacks have spent so much time using racism as an excuse for failure that we’ve failed to point out to black children just how much opportunity is out there waiting on them to grab it.

Dungy and Smith were unafraid to reach for the American Dream, unafraid to sacrifice for the American Dream, unafraid to help each other along the way.

This is a beautiful story that needs to be repeated and shouted from rooftops.

Dungy was born to educators in Jackson, Mich. He was a star quarterback in high school and at the University of Minnesota. He was twice MVP of the Gophers. Partly because of the NFL’s reluctance to embrace black quarterbacks in the 1970s, Dungy entered the NFL as an undrafted free-agent safety for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Racism threw Dungy a roadblock. He sidestepped it and became a starter on a Steelers’ Super Bowl team. When his career ended, he set his sights on becoming an NFL coach. He paid his dues as an assistant at Pittsburgh, Kansas City and Minnesota and landed a head-coaching assignment at age 41 with the sad-sack Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

By perfecting his Cover 2 defensive scheme, Dungy turned the Bucs into winners, a team that knocked at the Super Bowl’s door. While in Tampa, he taught Lovie Smith and Herm Edwards the principles and philosophies that made them fine NFL coaches.

After six seasons, as pro teams are prone to do, the Bucs fired Dungy, and the Colts snapped him up.

Despite several playoff disappointments, Indy’s ownership remained loyal to the most beloved coach in professional sports. Indy general manager Bill Polian and team owner Jim Irsay helped Dungy weather the suicide of his son last season.

Their faith in Dungy was rewarded on Sunday when the Colts sneaked past New England.

America is far from perfect. But America has made great progress along black-white racial lines. We need to shout that reality as loudly as we shout the injustice reality. Kids need to hear it long after Super Bowl XLI is over.

Should Garnett Buy the T-Wolves?

Posted Jan 25th 2007 10:50AM by Bethlehem Shoals
Filed under: Timberwolves, Western, NBA Rumors
We all started this season feeling sorry for KG, until he (and Mutoni) told us not to. The Wolves are somehow in contention for a playoff spot, and yet still dropped the ax on head coach Dwayne Casey. Good, confounding time as usual in Minnesota. The tension between Garnett's heroism and McHale's incompetence has defined it for over a decade, and something has got to give.

Martin Johnson of the New York Sun isn't the first person to catalog McHale's many missteps. As far as I know, though, he is the only writer to suggest that Garnett holds the key to his own salvation:

So if Garnett would like to stay in Minnesota, I have a modest suggestion for him that would cheer fans throughout the northern Midwest: Buy the franchise. Since Garnett arrived in the NBA at a young age, he has been richly rewarded and, according to the salary figures at basketball-reference.com, he's made $156 million playing pro hoops. He's earned several million more through endorsement deals (remember the Nike fun police campaign?). The Wolves are a small-market team, so their valuation is only about $303 million. With Garnett's wealth, which will grow by $50 million during the run of his current contract, he should be able to secure financing for the controlling stake in an offer of between $350 and $375 million to owner Glen Taylor.

No, it's not as insane as it sounds. And it's not so different from Mario Lemieux's purchase of his beloved Penguins. Granted, KG couldn't go at it alone, but Johnson's cooked up a perfectly reasonable coalition of other Minny athletes, including Dave Winfield, Chris Carter, and Kent Hrbek. Even if he didn't pull together this dream team of former area stars, Garnett's likely got enough charisma and capital to sell the public on it.

Then, of course, McHale would be out the door. As Johnson puts it, this "would prevent Garnett from becoming the tallest martyr in the sports world."

Broken leg reveals cancer, opportunity for treatment

Twelve-year-old cancer victim Julia Wagner was queen for a day when Miss Indiana Betsy Uschkrat of Sugar Land stopped by for a visit and let the youngster try on some of the crowns she has won on her voyage to next week's Miss America contest.

*

Most people wouldn't consider snapping a leg bone on a trampoline to be a lucky break, but for 12-year-old Julia Wagner, it was. In fact, it may have saved her life.

"It was a blessing in disguise," said her mom, Cristina.

Two days before she was to enter seventh grade at Dulles Middle School in Sugar Land, Julia decided to join her two younger brothers, 6-year-old Jesse and 3-year-old Jai, on the trampoline. Although she didn't slide off when she slipped, Julia's leg broke completely through, overlapping itself in her thigh.

"She brought it to our attention that where the break was, was where her leg had been hurting her," Cristina said. She shared that news with the nurse, who reported it to the doctor who, in turn, examined the x-ray of Julia's leg more thoroughly and discovered a bone tumor.

A biopsy was inconclusive, so Julia was sent to an oncologist for a second biopsy, which showed she has osteosarcoma, the most common type of malignant bone cancer. Osteosarcoma is the sixth leading cancer in children under age 15. Its cause is unknown, but it appears a genetic predisposition exists, rendering some people vulnerable to developing the condition.

"One day she was looking forward to school; next thing you know, we're told she has cancer and she can't go to school," Cristina said.

Just hours before Julia broke her leg, her youngest brother, Joshua, arrived home from the hospital after days of recovering from surgery for pyloric stenosis, a disease that causes severe vomiting and is similar to reflux disease. Joshua was less than 1 month old at the time of the operation to correct his condition by widening the opening from the stomach to the intestines. His condition is also thought to have a genetic predisposition.

"I got to Southwest Memorial when Julia broke her leg and all I could think was, 'Oh, my God,'" Cristina recalled. And it's her faith in God that she said is getting her through what seems to be one disaster after another, with bills constantly mounting.

"We've had a tough time," the single mother admitted, adding she had to stop working outside the home in order to stay nearby and care for her daughter.

"Julia always tells me she feels guilty that I had to quit my job, but I wouldn't have it any other way," Cristina said just two days after her daughter had another surgery to remove the external fixator. The device had been holding her leg in place since the accident in August. It incorporates a system of pins, rods and clamps that extend from an external device to deep inside - and sometimes through - the bone.

When doctors removed the fixator on Jan. 10, they found the bone still broken, so Julia was placed in a full body cast and has been recovering in a hospital bed in the living room of her Stafford home ever since.

Julia had a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) procedure performed the day after leaving the hospital, the results of which would tell doctors whether amputation of her leg would be required, or if they could install a prosthetic bone instead.

Last Tuesday, Julia got the good news that surgeons will install a prosthetic bone and give her a total knee replacement.

"I am wonderful!" her mother exclaimed just after receiving the news they and so many others had been praying for. "I just talked to Julia's doctor and we're looking at limb salvage. The way the break was actually helped save the leg."

When Julia undergoes the surgery on Monday, doctors will determine whether a spot they have discovered on her lung needs to be removed as well.

"The spot on her lungs has been there from the start. If it's something they need to remove, they'll remove it," said her mom.

Thus far, Julia has received 13 of 33 planned chemotherapy treatments, but they had to be stopped for the January surgeries.

"The treatments make her white blood cell count so low and make her so weak, so we're on a break so she can have the surgeries," Cristina explained.

When asked how she and her children have been able to cope with all that has come their way in such a short period of time, Cristina first cited her faith, then quickly added, "With the wonderful help of my parents. We live at home with them, thank goodness, because it's been a rough road."

There have been other bright spots as well, such as the Christmas time visit Julia received from Miss Indiana (and previously Miss Houston), Betsy Uschkrat, formerly of Sugar Land.

"She came home to see her parents and they know Julia likes opera, so they asked her to come by and see Julia," Cristina said, explaining Betsy has won numerous awards for her operatic voice.

Betsy's parents, Jim and Karen Uschkrat of Sugar Land, attend New Hope Lutheran Church in Missouri City, along with Cristina and her family, and heard Julia wanted to meet their daughter.

"We invited her to come to our Christmas party on Dec. 22, she heard Betsy sing and joined in on some sing-along carols as well," said Jim Uschkrat. "You could tell this was a big event for her, right after several brutal rounds of chemotherapy and radiation treatments."

For Julia, it was an experience she'll never forget.

"It was real cool," she said, still animated about the encounter three weeks later. "There were these two little steps and I had to use my crutches to get up them. Before I could even say anything, she got me by my waist and lifted me up and I was like, 'Wow! Miss Indiana just picked me up!'"

"Julia's a real inspiration," said Jim Uschkrat. "She's very courageous and upbeat, even though she's fighting a cancer that's very serious."

It's so serious, in fact, that the Make-A-Wish Foundation has granted her wish to have party similar to a quinceañera. It's scheduled for June 30 at the Elks Lodge in Stafford, and Julia is very much looking forward to the big event.

Her mom revealed Julia is also in the process of fulfilling another dream, to establish a foundation for osteosarcoma patients.

"I am, if you go and get those papers that I printed out," the anxious Julia interrupted her mom, directed her to her computer's printer.

"I spend a lot of time on the Internet, researching cancer support groups," she explained, adding she hopes to get the project under way soon.

Julia was a member of Chuck Norris' Kick Star Foundation before the trampoline accident occurred and she was diagnosed with cancer, and she hopes to return to the program once she heals from Monday's surgery.

"I became so dedicated and focused because of the Kick Star Foundation that I was actually looking forward to school this year," she said. "At the end of all this, I want to get back to my karate."

In an effort to help her literally get back on her feet and her family to do so figuratively, a fund in the form of a savings account has been established in her name at Chase Bank. Donations can be made at any branch to account number 2726598564 or may be mailed to Chase Bank, attention Carol Askew, 11806 Wilcrest, Houston, Texas, 77031.

The family is overwhelmed at the care and concern shown Julia as she faces the unknown, and Cristina said the prayers will continue for a successful surgery on Monday.

Although it's been a long, scary journey, she said, it all started with "a lucky break."

Happiness 101

Happiness 101
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/magazine/07happiness.t.html?ei=5088&en=2e27ba1944dae990&ex=1325826000&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
By D.T. MAX
Published: January 7, 2007

One Tuesday last fall I sat in on a positive-psychology class called the Science of Well-Being — essentially a class in how to make yourself happier — at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. George Mason is a challenge for positive psychologists because it is one of the 15 unhappiest campuses in America, at least per The Princeton Review. Many students are married and already working and commute to school. It’s a place where you go to move your career forward, not to find yourself.
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Illustration by Ian Adelman; Photograph by Stephen Lewis

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The class was taught by Todd Kashdan, a 32-year-old psychology professor whose area of research is “curiosity and well-being.” Kashdan bobbed around the room or sat, legs dangling, on his desk beneath a big PowerPoint slide that said “The Scientific Pursuit of Happiness” as he took the students, a few older than he, through the various building blocks of positive psychology: optimism, gratitude, mindfulness, hope, spirituality. Though the syllabus promised to “approach every topic in this class as scientists” and the assigned readings were academic, the classroom discussion was Oprah-ish. The students seemed intrigued by the research Kashdan presented mostly in relation to their own lives.

The focus of Kashdan’s class that day was the distinction between feeling good, which according to positive psychologists only creates a hunger for more pleasure — they call this syndrome the hedonic treadmill — and doing good, which can lead to lasting happiness. The students had been asked first to do something that gave them pleasure and then to perform an act of selfless kindness. They approached the first part of the assignment eagerly. One student recounted having sex with her boyfriend 30 feet underwater while scuba diving. Another said he “went to Coastal Flats and got hammered.” A third attended a Nascar race in North Carolina, smoked, drank and had sex. Some also watched favorite TV shows; others chatted with friends.

When it came time to talk about the second part of the assignment, the students were excited, too. The Nascar attendee, who was afraid of needles, gave blood. Another collected clothes from family members and donated them to a shelter for battered women. The boy who had gotten hammered bought a homeless person a 12-pack of “Natty Ice” at a 7-Eleven, wondering if it was the right thing to do. A fourth gave her waiter at Denny’s a $50 tip. At times, Kashdan, who ran the class in the nonjudgmental manner of a ’70s rap-session leader — he used the word “cool” a lot — would compliment them on their behavior and pull out a moral. In this case, as one student wrote in a summary she submitted to Kashdan, comparing “a day at the spa covered in really expensive French” stuff and “a day of community improvement covered in horse” manure, the smile on the community organizer’s face “beat out the smile on the masseur’s face any day.” That is, she had learned that doing good is good for you.

Though Kashdan brought up published studies that optimistic people live longer and that certain regions of the brains of positive people show more activity (“Have a very active left prefrontal lobe day,” he joked at one point), in class they didn’t spend a lot of time on clinical research. Absent were the rats with electrodes, data charts, syndromes and neuroses. The main experimental corpus seemed to be the students themselves, with Kashdan assuming the role of therapist, asserting that pleasure isn’t enough. True happiness comes with meaning, he said, and the students agreed.

I sat in on the course a few more times during the semester, and when Kashdan was done with pleasure versus selfless giving, he took up gratitude and forgiveness, close relationships and love, then spirituality and well-being and finally “meaning and purpose in life.” “I never use the word morality,” Kashdan said. Rather his goal was to show that “there are ways of living that research shows lead to better outcomes.”

More than 200 colleges and graduate schools in the United States offer classes like the one at George Mason. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Barbara Fredrickson passes out notebooks with clouds on a powdery blue cover for each student. At the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, students pass out chocolates and handwritten notes to school custodians and secretaries. The introductory positive-psychology class at Harvard attracted 855 students last spring, making it the most popular class at the school. “I teach my class on two levels,” says Tal Ben-Shahar, the instructor. “It’s like a regular academic course. The second level is where they ask the question, How can I apply this to my life?” True, the course is known as a gut, but it is also significant that 23 percent of the students who commented on it in the undergraduate evaluation guide said that it had improved their lives. “It wasn’t until my senior year that I started thinking maybe law school wasn’t for me,” wrote one graduate, Elizabeth Peterson, in her biographical précis for the masters program in applied positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She had decided to take the class on a whim. “I was pretty much hooked from there. I realized that what I loved the most was talking to people about their problems.”

Positive psychology brings the same attention to positive emotions (happiness, pleasure, well-being) that clinical psychology has always paid to the negative ones (depression, anger, resentment). Psychoanalysis once promised to turn acute human misery into ordinary suffering; positive psychology promises to take mild human pleasure and turn it into a profound state of well-being. “Under certain circumstances, people — they’re not desperate or in misery — they start to wonder what’s the best thing life can offer,” says Martin Seligman, one of the field’s founders, who heads the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Thus positive psychology is not only about maximizing personal happiness but also about embracing civic engagement and spiritual connectedness, hope and charity. “Aristotle taught us virtue isn’t virtue unless you choose it,” Seligman says.

Sitting in Kashdan’s classroom, you might wonder whether psychology had abandoned its proper territory or found a new one, and if a new one, whether it owed more to science or to Sunday school. Perhaps that was because the class reflected the discipline’s own tension between simplicity and complexity, “good tough science,” as Seligman calls it, and airier talk of values. With its emphasis on the self in the world, positive psychology is already an ethics seminar. Which is fitting, given that it has its roots in a Socratic dialogue of sorts. Seligman likes to tell the story of how his daughter Nikki, when she was 5, accused him of being a grouch. She reminded him that he had criticized her for being whiny and that she had worked hard to stop whining. If she could stop being whiny, he could stop being grumpy. He realized, he says, that she was right, that he was “a pessimist and depressive and someone of high critical intelligence” and that he needed to change. Seligman, who at 54 had just been elected president of the American Psychological Association and was renowned for his hard science — most of his research had been in depression — decided to put his considerable talents into finding out “what made life worth living.”

Though positive psychology is only beginning to be used as an educational tool in classrooms and secondary schools, in the nine years since Seligman’s epiphany it has taken a firm hold in academia. The field’s steering committee includes a number of psychologists and psychiatrists who have done highly regarded clinical work: Ed Diener of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose specialty is “subjective well-being”; Christopher Peterson at the University of Michigan, who has made a study of admired character traits around the world; George Vaillant, who has long headed a Harvard project tracking success and failure among the college’s graduates; and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate University, who has spent years studying “optimal functioning,” or the state of being intensely absorbed in a task, what he calls “flow.” Seligman’s book, “Authentic Happiness,” published in 2002, lays out the field’s fundamental principles and has been translated into nearly 20 languages. Last year’s annual positive-psychology summit in Washington attracted hundreds of academics working in the field or interested in doing so, as well as a children’s programming director, who was working to imbue her cartoons with positive psychology messages, and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, who studies the relationship between economics and perceptions of happiness. In addition there were a lot of “life coaches,” independent consultants who hire themselves out to help clients achieve their life goals.

Despite its seemingly American emphasis on self-reliance and self-expression, positive psychology is also proving popular in England and the British Commonwealth. Nick Baylis, a psychologist at Cambridge University, helped found the Well-being Institute there last year and is consulting with Wellington College, a private boarding and day school, on how to apply positive psychology to its curriculum. The Geelong Grammar School, a prestigious boarding and day school in Australia, is planning to shape its curriculum around the precepts of positive psychology in 2008, and the government of Scotland has also been in touch with Seligman to see whether the discipline might help its citizens. “Our old nation has been renewed through our new Parliament, and if we can embrace this new science of positive psychology, we have the opportunity to create a new Enlightenment,” one government official announced.

Positive psychology is popular with educators because if happiness is something that can be learned, it can be taught. And because being happier seems to have positive long-term effects not just on well-being but also on health and life span. In one often-cited study, researchers at the University of Kentucky analyzed the essays novices born before 1917 wrote on entering the School Sisters of Notre Dame and correlated them to the nuns’ life spans. They found that 9 out of 10 of the most positive 25 percent of the nuns were still alive at 85, while only one-third of the least positive 25 percent were. Overall, their study showed positive emotions correlated to a 10-year increase in life span, greater even than the differential between smokers and nonsmokers. Another study, by Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at U.C. Berkeley, correlated the smiles that the female graduates of Mills College in Oakland, Calif., displayed in two mid-20th-century yearbooks with life satisfaction and found that the bigger the smile, the more satisfying the marriage and the greater their well-being. Inspired by studies like these, positive psychologists have developed “interventions,” or practices, designed to maximize positive emotions and have tested them on thousands of people. One such intervention is to think every night about the good things that happened to you that day. Another is to make sure in any given day that you either work or play in a new area that draws on what positive psychologists call your “signature strengths” to create a sense of well-being. Gratitude visits — looking up someone who has taught or mentored you and thanking him or her — are important in positive psychology, too; this last intervention, studies show, gives the biggest increase in happiness of all.

In the first few weeks of the semester, Kashdan asked his students to keep a record of their thoughts and experiences. He then gave them “experiential assignments” to make them happier, working their emotions the way an athletic coach might work their muscles. One week they were to report on attempts to go into “flow.” “Sex, drugs and chocolate are all highly useful avenues for people to attain flow states,” Kashdan said. To enter flow, students were asked to do something that they were good at, be it writing, playing basketball or talking to their friends. According to positive psychology, your signature strengths play a special role in building your confidence and thus bringing you happiness. Seligman’s Web site, authentichappiness.org, has a 240-question test to help determine whether your gift is for creativity, bravery, love or something else. In class, one student recounted going into flow during a fistfight; another told of being at her father’s grave. A third talked about being with a friend watching TV and suddenly having a profound conversation. “We had so much love for each other,” the student remembered in class, “and suddenly we were crying.”

Several studies undertaken by positive psychologists have suggested that meditation enhances well-being, so another class assignment was to meditate for 15 minutes three days in a row, attend a free yoga class (Kashdan’s wife, a yoga instructor, arranged this with her studio), be mindful twice a day and report on the results. The mindfulness exercises — excercises in heightened awareness and openness to experience — are central to positive psychology and made a big impression, according to Kashdan: “Some said they just noticed for the first time how many types of trees there are on the way to campus.”

The following week, students were asked to watch “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset,” movies starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. In the former, the two fall in love through intense conversation during one long evening in Vienna and then part. The sequel catches up with them nine years later. The students had to write about the first time they fell in love. The next assignment was to pay a gratitude visit or write a gratitude letter. After that, the students were to exercise their curiosity by doing something “novel, complex, and uncertain . . . epistemic, sensory and social” — that is, they were to use their signature strengths to try something new. One student tasted a pomegranate for the first time; another went to a book reading by Carly Fiorina, the former C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard. Finally, the students were asked to select one memory they would be willing to spend an eternity with, an intervention inspired by the Japanese movie “After Life.”

Kashdan’s enthusiasm — he is a passionate teacher — ate up class time, and so the students never got to other parts of the syllabus, among them optimism exercises and exercises that would make them better teammates. On the last week, students handed in their final papers, describing how they had tried to enhance their lives toward, in Kashdan’s words, “a specific, personally meaningful positive outcome” during the semester. There was no final exam; the students’ grades were based in large part on the paper and class participation.

In an era when psychology is seeking to become a hard science of M.R.I.’s and evidence-based therapies, when, as Seligman says, “if it doesn’t plug into the wall, it’s not science,” positive psychology can seem like a retro endeavor with the appeal of a cure that fits on a recipe card. While this may make it particularly adaptable for use in the classroom, critics are often most disturbed by what they perceive as its prescriptive nature. “There is way too little evidence of stable, long-term benefits — and lack of harm — to justify large-scale incorporation of positive psychology programs into schools,” Julie Norem, chairwoman of the psychology department at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, said in an e-mail message. “It pays scant attention to individual differences.” For all that the open, 1960s-style classroom has fallen out of favor, it allowed a child to find his or her own way. In the words of the founder of the famous Summerhill school in England, a child should be free “to live his own life — not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows best.” Children were treated as unique, which you might think would result in a more capable, independent adults. By comparison, positive psychology can seem as if it is laying out a road and asking the adherent to follow. “If I could wave my magic wand, there would be no positive psychology — there would be positive psychologists,” says Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, whose own work in the science of affective forecasting suggests that what we think will make us happy rarely does, or at least not for long. “I guess I just wish it didn’t look so much like a religion.”

Indeed, the sectlike feel of positive psychology can be hard to shake off when watching classes like Kashdan’s or even when reviewing the record of the field’s beginnings. When Seligman was first trying to establish the discipline, he and his colleagues invited 25 young psychologists to the Yucatán to discuss the positive side of life. They snorkeled and talked philosophy and then swam some more. They summarized their work and listened to others’ reactions. One evening, the group devoted itself to poetry and song. Seligman recited Ezra Pound’s “Immorality”; a colleague named Sonja Lyubomirsky read some of Prospero’s speeches from “The Tempest.” Seligman’s daughter Lara — Seligman educates his five younger children in part by traveling with them — recited a Delmore Schwartz poem, “I Am Cherry Alive.”

The talk under the palapas was not just about happiness but also about engagement. Participants contrasted the “hedonic treadmill” with “the meaningful life.” To find the qualities that gave life purpose, the team examined Western religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and Bushido as well as the mores of 70 nations. Over time, positive psychologists, led by Christopher Peterson, settled on 24 virtues — or character strengths, as they prefer to call them — including courage, modesty, spirituality and leadership. “The agenda comes from the world,” Seligman told me. “These are universals we’re after.”

The search for what unites humans in virtue was an ambitious effort to integrate psychology with those fields that have long sat alongside it: ethics, religion, philosophy. Before the retreat in Mexico, Seligman met with one of his former professors, the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. His book “The Examined Life,” written late in his career, looked at how questions of value might be related to everyday experience. It was Nozick who suggested a “taxonomy of character,” by which he meant, as Seligman put it, a list of “those abiding moral traits that everyone values.” Lyubomirsky remembers that many of the young scientists were uncomfortable doing so. “There was a lot of debate about it,” she said. “We were trained as hard scientists.” Seligman wasn’t so sure himself that he wanted virtue to be part of positive psychology either: he was wary of science becoming prescriptive, but Csikszentmihalyi was enthusiastic, Seligman recalled, and in the end Seligman agreed.

Two criticisms as troubling as the problem of positive psychology’s religiosity are 1) that it is not new — psychology always cared about happiness and 2) that the publicity about the field has gotten ahead of the science, which may be no good anyway. True, there have been attempts to marry psychology to ethics, to enlist it in the service of decoding what it means to be fully human, throughout its history. In the 1950s and ’60s, for instance, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, among others, established humanistic psychology to focus on what gave meaning to life, looking at the very subjects positive psychologists now take as their own. But where Maslow and Rogers relied primarily on qualitative research for their theories, Seligman and his colleagues hope to establish positive psychology — and thus the nature of happiness itself — on firmer scientific ground. The idea that whatever science there is may not yet be first-class troubles Seligman, too. “I have the same worry they do. That’s what I do at 4 in the morning,” he says.

When Todd Kashdan asked his students at George Mason to tell him which they liked better, experiencing pleasure or doing good, he cautioned, “Don’t give me the Miss Universe answers.” But when I met the participants in the nation’s only master’s program in applied positive psychology, at the University of Pennsylvania, I felt the spirit of Gandhi was hovering over us. One woman wrote in her application essay, “My strange and energetic career has included activism for peace and justice; teaching safety and self-defense skills to 10,000 students.” She was also a founder of two nonprofit organizations and taught “Swedish massage and stress-reduction skills.” Another sold her Mercedes and was using her savings to pay for the course. A third left banking to find the meaning in life.

There were, in all, about 30 students in the master’s class at Penn on the Saturday in September I attended. MAPP, as the program is known, is organized around intensive days of class time, online work and conference calls. Seligman, who runs the program, says that he likes to invite others to lecture so he can learn what’s going on in the field, and so that day Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina was presenting her “broaden and build” theory, while Seligman sat at a little table nodding and taking notes. “It’s a neat design that allows humans and other organisms to grow and become more resourceful versions of themselves,” she told the class.

The first part of her theory stems from a series of experiments that she published in 2005 in which five groups of 20 people each watched short film clips. The clips were meant to elicit negative, positive or neutral emotions. The participants were given a sheet ruled with 20 blank lines and asked to write down what they were feeling. Those who had just had positive emotions induced were able to provide more ideas about what their responses would be than those with either negative or neutral ones.

For Fredrickson, this was evidence that positive emotions lead to broader thinking. The participants were also tested for what is called global-local-visual processing. When asked to look at a design on a computer of three squares arranged in a triangle, those who had watched happy-making film clips tended to see the broader pattern — i.e. the triangular pattern — while the angrier subjects saw only the squares. (The neutral ones saw some of each.)

This was only the first part of Fredrickson’s theory. But it could be that thinking broadly has no effect on happiness or well-being — it might even be a deficit. To show that broadening led to building, she then described an experiment she had undertaken on a group of employees at Compuware, a progressive information-technology firm in Detroit. With the company’s assistance, she followed two groups — one that was taught a loving-kindness meditation (a meditation in which the practitioner repeats phrases that cultivate a caring attitude toward all life) and one that was wait-listed for the meditation. After eight weeks, she compared the two groups’ responses to questions about well-being. Those who meditated reported higher mental resources than before; their mindfulness, freedom from illness and connectedness to others all increased. But interestingly, their sense of well-being hadn’t, at least not immediately. It dropped at first. “It’s like you started a gym membership and then you realize you have to go,” Fredrickson theorized. But once their sense of well-being increased, they retained their edge over those who only wanted to meditate even after the meditation program was over.

All this interested Seligman’s students, but what Fredrickson says always catches their attention most is a study Fredrickson did with a Brazilian workplace psychologist named Marcia Losada, who observed annual strategic-review meetings of employees through one-way mirrors. The data she collected showed that the most effective teams — the criteria were customer satisfaction, profitability and internal review — were the ones who had more positive meetings. There was even a number that corresponded to the minimum amount of positive to negative feedback necessary to encourage successful functioning. That number, Fredrickson told the class, was three positive comments to one negative comment. “The ratio lady,” one student called her.

With its emphasis on universals and practical applications, positive psychology fits these divided times: it preaches values without linking them to a particular value system and embraces spirituality without making you go to church. When positive psychology was introduced into the language-arts program at Strath Haven High School outside Philadelphia in 2003, the left-leaning parents welcomed it because the values were internationally accepted; all but the most conservative ones were reassured that there were values at all.

Seligman recently held a meeting with the leaders from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, the Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pa., the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx and the KIPP program, a national network of public charter schools, at which the educational leaders discussed introducing positive psychology into their schools. They are all looking to restore “wholeness” to the teenage years, to replace the supposed sense of certainty that the ’60s removed and that returned in the ’80s as a national political objective but that teachers are now too bogged down in the fundamentals to teach and adults, working longer and longer hours, are simply too busy to shore up at home. A follow-up meeting is scheduled for June, this time with a dozen schools; one item on the agenda is to add personal strengths and virtues to admissions criteria. (Educational Testing Service is exploring a test that students wouldn’t be able to fake.) “What this is about is building character,” Seligman says.

Currently, the biggest project on positive psychology’s drawing board is at the Geelong School. “As a school, we would like to know how to make all students more resilient, how to turn depressing thoughts into positive ones,” Charles Scudamore, the head of the project at what Seligman calls “Australia’s Eton,” wrote in an e-mail message. That there is a need for a curriculum to promote engagement and happiness among teenagers is obvious, and Geelong is the first school to give positive psychologists a chance to show that they can really change teaching. According to Scudamore, “When we adopt a positive-psychology approach, it will be seen and practiced in all that we do.” The Australians “have had a lot of depression in kids, that’s half the reason they want it,” said Ed Diener, the professor of psychology at the University of Illinois.

What the psychologists have in mind for Geelong is very much the sort of intervention Kashdan was teaching at George Mason. The draft proposal by which they secured Geelong’s support included gratitude exercises, exercises in the “three pathways of happiness,” “the four ways to promote savoring” and “the five ways to overcome” adversity. To teach savoring, the teacher would explain mindfulness and show the students how to taste their food more thoroughly and then instruct them to try “savoring with a friend.” The students would have journals to record their emotions, their “grudges and gratitudes.” They would mentor a younger student too. Scudamore says he hopes that even the teachers will feel “their well-being” and their teaching skills enhanced. Seligman and his family are scheduled to make a six-month visit. An American-trained positive-psychology instructor will be in residence to provide training and real-time feedback.

This endeavor outstrips the ongoing Strath Haven experiment. The effort there, financed by a $2.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is limited to the ninth-grade language-arts program. At the school last year, the positive psychologists interwove their teachings with the literature classes. The idea was to buffer the lessons from bleak books like “Lord of the Flies” and “Romeo and Juliet” with some reassuring thoughts — or at least a more positive framework for understanding human behavior than the classics offer. Thus, according to Mark Linkins, now coordinator of the Swarthmore school district’s curriculum, who helped teach the classes, the animalistic and murderous Jack in “Lord of the Flies” shows “what happens when someone is lacking in signature strengths.” And when reading “The Odyssey,” students were asked: “What are the signature strengths that Odysseus lived and breathed? What are the things he might have improved on to make things go better?” It is too soon to know the effect of these stratagems on the school’s students, since part of the protocol agreed to with the Department of Education requires that they be followed for four years. The results will be compared with a control group that received the standard curriculum. (For his part, Seligman home-schools the children he had with his second wife. He says he likes to balance the standard high-school fare he gives the older ones with “books in which notions of virtue and nobility do not end in humiliation and death,” like Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End.”)

Not all positive psychologists are sure educational interventions are a good idea. Lyubormisky, for instance, turned down a similar request from the Compton school system in California. “I did not think the science was ready to be applied in that big a way,” she told me. Linkins acknowledges that happiness may come at the cost of a full understanding of literature and human complexity. But, he said, “it’s preferable to be happy than not, even if that means the potential for creative output is diminished.”

The question is, Can positive psychology actually fulfill its promise of making people happier? If positive emotions widen the sphere of what it is to be human, as positive psychology asserts, then positive psychology, at least as it is taught in the classroom, can seem to narrow it. If you are not optimistic, fake it. If you do not have friends, make some. I wondered what sort of student positive psychology would create. Was he or she more likely to be a future Nobel Peace Prize winner or J. P. (Gus) Godsey, the Virginia Beach stockbroker, dad and Craftsmen-tool enthusiast whom USA Weekend Magazine declared in 2003 “the happiest person in America” (“You are a blessed, happy person, Gus,” Martin Seligman commented in the article. “You’ve created many of your blessings on your own.”)

When I e-mailed various graduates of Penn’s first master’s class, I found that they continued to take positive psychology’s emphasis on the engaged life very seriously. One woman was using positive psychology to teach first-year medical students better patient-communication skills, citing Fredrickson’s optimal flourishing ratio as a benchmark. John Yeager, who has a doctorate in education and runs the Center for Character Excellence at the Culver Academies, a boarding school in Indiana, wants to “help teachers ‘broaden and build’ character strengths and positive emotions in children, young adults and themselves.”

Of course the master’s students were a self-selected group, willing to pay almost $40,000 for a degree with no clear career track. The students at George Mason, though they, too, had chosen the course, were perhaps more relevant to the question of what positive psychology can really teach. There I found a mixed response. They seemed remarkably sure that they had undergone an important experience but less sure what the nature of that experience had been. Had they saved the world or themselves? I spoke to Brandon Rasmussen, an easygoing student who seemed to me like a surfer dude washed up on some New Age shore. The class had energized him, and he had been a vigorous participant — earning an A. His final paper was about learning to really be with his friends, going into flow with them, something he had long had difficulty doing. “My personal satisfaction is the personal measure for me, and my personal satisfaction is great,” he explained. “I hate to say this, but really in the scheme of things we’re not going to change the war in Iraq.” Then he paused and thought how that sounded. “We can only fix the world one person at a time.”

D.T. Max is a frequent contributor to the magazine. His most recent book is “The Family That Couldn’t Sleep,” a scientific and cultural history of fatal familial insomnia, mad cow and other prion diseases.