About Boodle

A New Look at the Meaning of Money

Boodle (noun, etymology Dutch from ‘boedel‘: estate, possession, inheritance, stock.’). 1. Crowd, pack, lot, as in ‘the whole boodle.’ 2. a. Counterfeit money b. Money acquired or spent illegally or improperly, particularly when used in bribery for political purposes. 3. Slang for money in general.

Dough. Do-re-mi. Spondulicks. Skrilla. Lucre. Loot. Moolah. Mazuma. Cheese. Gelt. Gravy. Boodle. What is this stuff we call money? Whatever it is, one thing’s for sure. It isn’t “just money.”

Money is a social agreement, a “promise to pay” that, by definition, relies on linked social networks. We tend to act as if we can be rugged individualists with money, but we can’t. Boodle doesn’t have to be a bribe to ourselves. What I’m calling Boodle is a set of ideas, stories, and exercises designed to aid in that reconstruction. This site is a place where you can:

• find and communicate with others who are questioning the meaning of money
• gather resources for innovative approaches to money matters
• be inspired by the ways others are reconstructing our economy in meaningful ways

Do you believe that our “money world” needs to be very different than it is? As never before, it is clear that individual actions when it comes to money  do not occur in a vacuum. Like most people, you might tend to think of money as something outside of yourself, something you can choose to make more of, “grow,” give away, or walk away from. But money isn’t outside of you. Money is you. It’s all of us, and everything. It’s boodle.

Huh?

Money is boodle as in counterfeit, at very least “funny.” Money is boodle in the sense that you’ve been bribing yourself with it in various ways for far too long. Powerful as money’s influence is in your life, just like the word “boodle,” money is, at base, absurd. If you want to create real wealth in your life and on earth, you don’t need to visualize abundance, learn a secret, or act like a rich dad. You need to question the authority of money in your life and free it from its socially-constructed shackles.

How? Think and then act outside your money box.

Learn more about why:

• Money has no value
• There’s no way to build “personal” wealth
• Worshipping image over substance has such a high cost
• Greed is not good
• Money is not rational
• Success doesn’t come from how much we have
• We can’t get rich by curing our “money hang ups”
• Trusting each other is the only way out of this mess

When it comes to money, we need not only personal, but collective change. And now is the time to begin to make those changes. Today, our world is more socially networked than at any time in history. A grass-roots effort has the ability to create its own momentum, to surge across other local networks and create a wave of change. We are all in it together when it comes to money, and together we can make money what we need it to be.

Money is funny—as in strange and mysterious and even absurd in the way it operates and makes people behave—but money need not be a joke. Boodle is a new way of thinking about, relating to, and just “being” with money. When it comes to money, couldn’t you spare a change?

Money may not be what you think it is