The goal of going to school is usually to get a good job so you can make decent money. But with all its theory, school rarely teaches you how to manage your personal finances. Such financial training is usually — and more often than not, unintentionally — left up to our families. Who, by the way, probably weren’t trained properly themselves. To top it off, the cost of living today, especially in a big city like Los Angeles, is sky high. So what’s a (often literally) poor, unenlightened wage earner to do? Read on. We’ve gathered a group of money experts to help you put together two and two.

You debt? You bet!

Credit card debt has become the American way. It’s also something that — although it has a certain devil’s charm — ultimately prevents us from experiencing financial peace.

“Debt is the cruelest form of illusion,” says Barbara Stanny, author of Secrets of Six Figure Women, and the soon-to-be-released Overcoming Underearning. “It gives you the illusion of prosperity. What I noticed from the women I interviewed [in Secrets] was that as long as they had debt, they couldn’t make it to that next level. Once they stopped debting — not necessarily paying off all the debts, but stopped accruing them — it freed up all this energy for them to grow financially.”

Stanny believes that debting is a reflection of low self-esteem. “I think the same thing is true with underearning. There is some part of every debter and underearner that feels devalued. Often it comes from a childhood wound or some kind of trauma or abuse.”

“I have found when people have credit card debt, they are not miserable because they don’t have any money. They don’t have any money because they are miserable,” says TV host and best-selling author Suze Orman,  whose The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous and Broke was recently released. “When you feel less than, you spend more than.” This perpetuates an external reality that matches your internal feelings, often subconsciously orchestrated. Unless you identify and begin releasing the thoughts, feelings and beliefs that hold you back financially, they will continue to take over your financial — and inevitably entire — life.

So how do we go about doing this? “Fear, shame and anger are the three internal obstacles to wealth,” shares Orman. “So rather than working on your financial state of being, let’s start looking at what you are afraid and ashamed of. If you have credit card debt and nobody has a clue about it, why not try telling every single person you know how much credit card debt you have? That can alleviate your shame.”

Stanny believes that identifying and clarifying a belief has a tremendous amount of power. “What I find in my workshops is that most people never connected that the way their parents  handled money affects them today. Often just seeing how the past has been shaping the future can enable you to make different decisions.” She also emphasizes the importance of surrounding yourself with achievers, so as to open up to a more positive way of thinking. “I found that underearners tend to surround themselves with pessimists, naysayers, people who hold them back. Start being with people who are excited about their lives and want to do more.”

And never underestimate that old cliché about changing your attitude. Maria Nemeth, seminar leader and author of The Energy of Money, speaks of the difference in perspective between those who are successful and those who aren’t. “It’s not that successful people don’t have beliefs, thoughts, worries and doubts. It’s just that these don’t interest them as much as their goals and dreams do. Everyone has the opportunity to shift their focus onto their goals and dreams. When you do that, you begin to take control over money. You don’t expand into getting more by focusing on not having enough. You expand into more by appreciating what you have.”

Taking action

So once you start getting your internal issues in order, what actions can you take to improve your financial situation? Unsurprisingly, our experts agree that writing down all of your expenses, debt and goals is a great way to begin. By doing this, you break through any denial. These elements will also become more real — which typically motivates people to do things differently.

Then the next step is to track your expenses and formulate some kind of spending plan. “A budget is not a form of medieval torture,” says Dave Ramsey, radio talk show host and  author of The Total Money Makeover. “It’s simply you telling your money what to do and tracking where it went.”

Having a bigger reason for change is crucial, too. “There are so many articles you can read about how to balance your budget, manage your money and get out of credit card debt,” begins Nemeth. “These are often very good, but you have to ask why people don’t do it. This is because they don’t see why having financial health is important in terms of leading a well-lived, fulfilling life. Most people think money is separate from the other areas of their lives. But how you are with your money directly relates to how you are with your time, in relationships, and it even relates to your physical vitality.”

But for those of us who are freelancers or uncertain about our monthly income for whatever reason, how can we create a budget? In these cases, Ramsey suggests making what he calls a prioritized spending plan. “If you don’t know what your monthly income will be, then you prioritize your expenses from most important to least important.” List everything you need to do with money this month — such as eat, pay the electric bill, fix the car, etc. — and put a dollar amount beside it. Then rank the items on the list in order of priority. “Then when you make money, you go through the list as far as you can,” says Ramsey.

He also suggests getting out the credit cards and having a “plastectomy.” “What would you tell someone who has lung cancer who thinks smoking is the answer? You can’t go into debt to solve your problem. You have a career crisis and the house is on fire, and you have to act like it is. This means you’re going to get an extra job, you’re going to have a garage sale, you’re going to name your fourth kid Ebay. You have to get radical.”

The road less debted

When it comes to getting out of debt, many people just don’t know where to start. Who do you pay back first? Is it best to start saving, or would that money be better spent paying down your credit cards? The first thing Ramsey advises people to do is to start a $1,000 emergency fund. “This is before you do anything. Before you pay minimum payments, get out of debt or start retirement. Quickly, in a month or two, get $1,000 cash in the bank.”

Now why does he suggest this over putting it all toward lowering the interest on your credit card debt? “Interest isn’t your problem right now, it’s cash flow,” he responds. “The car is going to eventually break; something is going to need fixing. And when it does it will be new debt.” And even if you know your interest rate is not going down immediately, it feels better, psychologically, to take money out of a savings account than it does to increase your debt.

For lowering it, Ramsey recommends attacking the smallest credit card debt first. It gives you a sense of accomplishment that will help motivate you to pay off the others. And he suggests attacking your credit cards with a vengeance until you’re out of debt. “Your friends have to think you’re crazy. Beans and rice, rice and beans on the budget. You’re not doing anything else — your whole life is about getting out of this debt really quickly.”

Is he saying that you can’t have a vacation or go out to eat for seven years? If it takes you that long, then yes. Ramsey is an advocate of temporary deprivation to create an abundant future for the rest of your life. His views are rather militaristic. “During this time you don’t do anything but get out of debt. I don’t want to hear about some birthday present to yourself. You can wander into debt, but you can’t wander out. It requires tremendous amounts of focused intensity. Until you’ve gotten your emergency fund in place and you’re debt free except for the house, you have to completely go crazy. This could take one to two years, depending on how big your hole is and how big the shovel is you have to dig with.”

Nemeth, Orman and Stanny, however, don’t feel a plan that extreme is necessary or even the best way to go. In fact, several of them feel that such deprivation is more likely to lead to failure (though many people have success with Ramsey’s plan). The key is simply spending less — making smarter choices while maintaining an overall plan of action with a higher purpose.

“There’s no such thing as a monetary monk,” says Orman. “Nobody abstains from everything all the time. If you cut out all pleasures, you’re going to hate your life, hate your work, and hate everything about money. Then what’s it going to do for you?” She suggests just choosing wisely and creating a plan that takes your personality into account. “Instead of going to a movie every weekend, can you just go twice a month? And can you just not get popcorn and diet coke?”

FICO! FICO! FICO!

Orman urges people to immediately start raising their FICO score. “Most people don’t understand the ramifications their FICO score has on every single aspect of their financial life. They just think it’s enough if they even understand what it is.” (By the way, it’s the number that determines the interest rate you pay on your credit card, your car loan and home mortgages.) “The truth is it’s far more than that. It’s the number that will determine if a landlord will rent to you, in many cases if an employer will now hire you, and how much you will actually pay in premiums. It has to do with every aspect of your financial life.”

So how much difference can a good FICO score make? Let’s use the example of buying a home. For a house with a $350,000 mortgage, the difference between a FICO score in the 500 range and one in the upper 700 range for a 30 year 6 percent fixed mortgage is $750 a month. So there.

When you’re not aware of your score, things can sneak up on you. Let’s say you buy that house. You’ve never been in a car accident, you’ve never had a ticket, and all of a sudden you get a notice telling you your insurance premium for your car has just been raised by 30 percent. What just happened? “Well, one month ago,” says Orman, “when you were in a department store, they offered you one of those credit cards where you get that 10 percent discount. If you have used more than 50 percent of your available credit on a department store credit card, the insurance companies are going to check your credit reports. And when they see that you’ve spent over 50 percent, they’re going to increase your car insurance premium.” So yes, Big Brother is watching you. And that’s why you can’t be in the dark about your FICO score.

To help you out, Orman has developed an inexpensive FICO kit that helps you read your FICO score, identify any mistakes your credit report may contain (it often does), correct them, and tell you what actions to take  to raise your score. To get a FICO score, visit the My FICO Web site  at www.myFICO.com, but for the first 100 people who e-mail the Weekly at mherrera@laweekly.com, we’ll send you Orman’s FICO kit for free.

Making ends meet — and then some

Not making enough? If so, one of two things is happening: either you really aren’t making enough money and need a new job, or you’re making enough but spending too much. “The short term answer is the dreaded part-time job,” says Ramsey in regards to the first scenario. “The longer term answer is a career track shift, which usually involves some form of education. This means instead of watching Seinfeld reruns at night, you have to be learning something that will make you worth more in the marketplace.”

Orman, however, warns people against blindly go back to school because they simply don’t want to keep doing what they’re doing now (not that Ramsey is suggesting that either). Especially with the cost of school today, it’s important to decide why you’re going before you go back. Otherwise, school can leave you just as confused as you were before — and with less time and money, too.

Now…raise of hands, please: Have you ever been so down and out that you felt the only option you had for paying your bills was to charge them? If so, you’ve played the victim role big time. “You don’t just suddenly not have money to pay your bills,” says Orman. “That doesn’t just creep up on you. You know very well beforehand that you have things going out that you don’t have money for. And there are only two solutions for this: You have to either cut down on your expenses or you have to make more money.” (Sound familiar?)

“You have to break this cycle of running to the credit cards every time there’s a problem,” says Ramsey. “Decide you’re going to sell something, put something on Ebay, or take a part-time job. The credit card is a rubber crutch. It’s a poser. It makes you think it’s going to help you and instead you lean onto it and land on the floor.”

A new age for our young

Orman, who bad-mouths debt so much she has often been coined “the credit card hawk” by the media, has some advice that may surprise you. It applies to those who are under 35 years old. “If you’re already bagging it to lunch every day, you just cut every possible thing you can think of, have a high FICO score and a job you love, but are new to it so they haven’t discovered your value yet, then I don’t have a problem with your charging up to 10 percent a month of your take-home on credit cards to make it. As long as the interest rate on that credit card is 2-4 percent.” Orman condones this because she sees it as an investment in yourself and your future career. “Rather than good debt and bad debt, it’s good use and bad use. A good use of a credit card is to go into a grocery store to charge food you need. Bad use is going into a restaurant and charging a meal on a credit card that you can’t afford to pay off in full at the end of the month.”

At the age of 35, however, Orman maintains that you have to get serious about demolishing your debts. If you have credit card debt and that debt is above an 8 percent interest rate and you can’t get it any lower, here’s what she says to do:

“If you have a 401k plan that matches, you always invest up to the point of the match no matter what your debt situation looks like,” she says. “The caveat here is that you have to know that you will be staying at your job long enough to get the vesting of that money.” But if you’re leaving soon and you won’t be vested, or your company doesn’t have a match [this advice is for people who have debt at interest rates above 8 percent, as stated in the above paragraph], then you’re better off paying down your credit cards. “When you pay off credit card debt, this improves your debt to credit ratio, which makes up about 30 percent of your FICO score, and your FICO score goes up. When you FICO scores goes up, your interest rates, assuming you have a job, start to go down. Your insurance premiums can possibly go down. Everything that you pay starts to cost you less, which in the long run gives you more money to invest.”

Orman is the first to admit that many financial advisers would think she has lost her mind for suggesting this, but she has good reasoning behind her advice. “Today we are in the lowest tax bracket or our lifetime with nothing, in my estimation, but a lot of jibber jabber from the politicians trying to solve that problem. Do you think it’s probable that 10, 20, 30 years from now — when we have our 75-77 million baby boomers retiring, Medicare is down the drain and pension plans have gone bankrupt — that maybe they’re going to have to raise tax brackets even if they don’t want to? I do. So what sense does it make to take a tax write-off today, at the lowest possible tax bracket of your lifetime, to possibly withdraw that money at the highest tax bracket at your lifetime?” So she suggests, after the point of the match, that your credit card debt has to go. Then your next step is to invest in a Roth, if you qualify, before you go back to your 401K plan.

Learning (and teaching) is key

To become successful with money, you need to learn more about it. “Anything you don’t   understand can be problematic,” says Stanny, who, way back when, was an heir to a huge amount of money. “I never had the sense that I could make it on my own. I am more secure now and I have much less money. When it’s just dumped on you and you have no preparation, you need to understand how to manage it.”

So it’s important to learn as much as you can about money: jargon, definitions, trends, etc. The more you know, the wiser your decisions and the greater your options. Robert Kiyosaki, best-selling author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, urges people to educate themselves instead of relying on the advice of so-called financial experts. “Most people posing as financial experts aren’t really experts, so they’re handing out bad advice,” he says. “You have to determine a real expert from a fake expert. You have to know their track record. Most stockbrokers don’t invest in stocks, and most real estate brokers don’t invest in real estate. But they give out the financial advice.”

So how can you make sure your education is coming from a good source? “Always be sure the person you talk to practices what they preach,” says Kiyosaki.

And how can we teach our kids to be healthy with money? “You can’t teach what you don’t know,” says Stanny. “The first thing is to be a model for your kids. With my kids, for example, I hammered “no debt!” into their heads. When they graduated I had them set up automatic savings. Just that experience of watching their savings grow empowered them. And they watched me screw up and saw what can happen when you don’t understand money.”

Kiyosaki suggests playing Monopoly with them. He started playing with his rich dad when he was 9 years old. “From Monopoly you learn the formula of great wealth. And we all know the formula: four green houses and one red hotel. It also teaches you the power of passive income and the power of debt. You can learn all that in that little game.”

A “couple” of things to consider

Ever notice there’s only an “n” differentiating the word “finance” from “fiancé”?

“Fifty percent of all people who get married get divorced, and the number-one reason for divorce is arguments over money,” states Orman plainly. Not a pretty picture for the engaged. To avoid problems in this area, Orman suggests that couples become financially intimate. This means sharing everything and working together on a plan that works for both of you — ideally before you get married. “If your fiancé is somebody who’s already spending more than you know they have, if they refuse to talk to you about a prenuptial agreement, if they leave large tips when they have credit card debt, then what are you doing getting married to them? That’s the biggest mistake you’ll ever make.”

Ouch! And wait…it gets worse: “Once you’re married, if you have a spouse who is hiding credit card debt, who is constantly spending every penny and will not save, and it’s making you sick to your stomach, and you have tried numerous times to talk with them but to no avail, then I’m  sorry to say that you’re not going to be able to change that person’s behavior. And you’re better off getting divorced sooner rather than later.” So the trick is to get smart before you commit. “Sit down and write out what the issues you have with each other are. Then write out what you are willing to do to change them. Set goals for yourself, and reevaluate two months later.”

But if you find divorce is the only answer, make sure you first pay off all credit cards and close the accounts down. Get your name off the mortgage and car loan as well. In other words, completely burn all financial bridges you have, or have ever had, with your spouse. “Closing down the accounts is not enough. They’ve got to be paid off and redone in just the spouse’s name who keeps the assets. Even if that means you have to sell the house and move out,” says Orman. Otherwise your ex-spouse’s bad habits, even after you’re divorced, can actually ruin your credit.

Planning for a brighter future

No one likes a pessimist, but it’s starting to look like a bad idea to rely on the government for your retirement. “In 2008, the first baby boomer starts to retire,” begins Kiyosaki, touching on what Orman stated earlier. “There are [at least] 75 million baby boomers. You pay each boomer $1,000 a month for Social Security and that’s $75 billion a month. And that’s not counting Medicare.” To put this amount of money into perspective, there has been $84 million budgeted for the reconstruction of Iraq. “So we haven’t yet seen the $75 billion accrued payments we owe the baby boomers. Which means they’ll probably have to print more money, and the more money they print the less valuable the dollar becomes. So if you’re counting on the government, you’re going to wait in a long line.”

Orman and Ramsey suggest investing in a Roth IRA. “It’s the best retirement vehicle you’re going to find, bar none,” says Orman.

“If you’re 30 years old and save only $100 a month in a ROTH IRA until you’re 70, you’ll have $1,001,000,” says Ramsey. “So you can retire a millionaire on $100 a month. That’s pizza and cable money.”

Kiyosaki suggests being more proactive than simply investing for the long term and diversifying. But it’s an absolute prerequisite that if you take a more proactive route, you need to get well educated before you start making more risky investments.

Money rules!

Here are a few money rules to keep in mind, based on the collective knowledge of our experts:

• Read something every day about money.

• Save something — even if it’s as little as $10 — every month.

• Never loan money out of a 401K plan or use it to pay off credit card debt.

• Never close down your credit card accounts once you’ve paid them off. If you do this you’ll hurt your FICO score.

• Never open up a lot of department store cards where you use more than 50% of the available credit. That will hurt your insurance premiums.

• A will is not enough in most states. You also need a living revocable trust (this applies to California).

• If you don’t yet own a home, that should be your number-one financial goal.