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.
The Wicked Witch Of The World Wide Web
“Far away, princess, in a realm much less magical than ours, a wicked witch has cast a terrible spell,” explained Charlie.
“What kind of spell?” asked the princess. “Do all the princesses in the world fall asleep until they are kissed by a handsome prince?”
“No, princess. This spell affects everyone in the country, not just princesses,” explained Charlie. “She has cast a net wide across the land that constantly sends all the people images of amazing and beautiful things they can buy, updating it with new information, new images, new everything…”
“Actually Charlie, that doesn’t really sound so bad,” said the princess.
“It’s not supposed to sound bad. It’s supposed to sound wonderful. It’s supposed to sound almost like magic, like something you wouldn’t believe was possible only years before…”
“Exactly…” said the princess, confused.
“If it sounded bad, people wouldn’t want it. They wouldn’t want to get caught up in it. By showing them all these wonderful things, the wicked witch makes people want them more and more. She constantly shows people things they can’t afford, things they don’t need but look lovely on the net, and so they always want to spend all of their money, and can never save any of it.”
“Ok,” said the princess, still not totally sure why this was so bad.
“And so the people become trapped, working for weeks and months or even years to buy things they hadn’t wanted before the web showed them. It means people are never really happy, because the witch makes sure that her net is always showing them new things they don’t have, new things they believe might make them happy this time.
“They crave things they didn’t know about just seconds before. The witch’s spell is like a spider’s web, a world-wide spider’s web, that has caught all of the people in its invisible strands, so they can’t escape,” said Charlie.
“How can they escape? Do they need a knight in shining armour with a sharp sword to cut through the strands?”
“No, even that wouldn’t work. It’s actually much simpler than that, but also much harder. All they have to do is not want to be in the web.”
“But that’s so easy,” said the princess. “Who would want to be in a web?”
“They do,” said Charlie. “That’s how evil the witch’s spell is. Everyone wants to be in the web all the time, connected to all the other people in the web, even if it means spending all their money and never being free.”
“Well let’s never go there then,” concluded the princess, at which point a pinging noise came from under a cushion.
Charlie looked at her…
“Oh” said the princess. “That web.”
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.
