To celebrate the launch of our new book, Happy Ever After: Financial Freedom Isn’t A Fairytale, we are posting excerpts from the book, specifically the fairytale segments of our favourite spoiled little princess being taught about money, savings, and investing by her talking pet frog, Charlie Croaker.
How To Own A Cool Cat
Charlie the frog joined the princess looking out of her castle window, to see what they could learn from the people below.
“Now that is one cool cat,” he said.
“Who? Where?” asked the princess.
“You see the boy walking out of town, with all of his belongings in a bag over his shoulder?”
“Yes. I see him. Is he really cool? Should I marry him and live happy ever after?”
“What is wrong with you?” Charlie croaked. First, no, marrying someone is not the way to become happy ever after and second, look at him… He’s clearly under-age!”
“Oh. Sorry,” the princess mumbled.
“And anyway, I really was talking about the cat.”
The princess looked again, and saw that a black and white cat was walking beside the boy, or was the boy walking beside the cat? It was hard to tell, the cat was so confident. “That is a pretty cool cat,” she had to agree, “but where are they going, and why are they leaving the magic kingdom?”
“Well,” said Charlie, “That’s Dick Whittington, and if I’m not wrong, he’s leaving to find fame and fortune in London, where he will eventually become Lord Mayor not just once or twice, but three times.”
The princess stared quizzically at the talking frog. “And how do you know all that?”
“What? You can accept that a frog can talk, but my ability to see into the future is a step too far?”
“Ok, but why does Dick Whittington become so rich and famous?”
“Well, the impressive thing about Dick,” Charlie tells her, “Is that he has learned a lot of the lessons we have been discussing. Although he has heard that the streets of London are paved with gold, he doesn’t believe that and he knows he doesn’t really have any skills that anyone will pay a lot of money for. His best chance is to get a poorly paid job working as a servant in a rich man’s house, which is exactly what he will do for the first few years.”
“That doesn’t sound like such a great plan to me,” said the princess.
“We all have to start somewhere,” said Charlie. “I started out as a talking tadpole, and Dick will have to start at the bottom too. The good thing is, he knows it, and has a plan to get ahead, which is where the cat comes in.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. Being a servant is just going to be Dick’s day-job. In his evenings off and weekends, he will have a side-gig offering the cat’s services clearing houses of rats and mice. That cat is an excellent mouser, and while the streets of London aren’t paved with gold, they are definitely plagued by rats. While Dick’s regular job is enough to keep him alive, he saves and invests so much from his rat-catching business that he can buy up more businesses, and has enough assets that he no longer needs to work. Eventually they make him Lord Mayor of London three times.”
“Really?” the princess repeated.
“Yes, really, you can make enough money to never need to work again. You need to save it and invest it until you have twenty five times your spending…”
“No. I meant, really, you talked when you were a tadpole?”
In the illustration on the cover of Happy Ever After, we show our princess at the start of some forests. She doesn’t know what she’s about to walk into, and she definitely doesn’t know how to get out of the woods once she steps in.
Like the rest of us.
The goal of Happy Ever After is to show a way out of the woods, to shorten the path so we aren’t lost and looking for help our whole lives. I wrote it for my daughter, the inspiration for the princess in the stories, to understand how she can make her own way in the world, and never feel lost. I hope you can use it to do the same for your little princesses and princes too.
