We gays seem pretty prosperous. Let me ask a question: is it because of or despite - our being gay? Without a financial manual to gay life, most of us achieve despite our gayness. But many aspects of gay life can add to our bottom line. Let's see how.

What's gay about gay money? What's different about our money matters?

• We do have more spending income. Why? because we have fewer kids - and remember: kids run $450,000 each these days. We have no six figure marriages - or divorces. and we can get much of our gay money all up front, early in life, when if we invest it early we can be assured financially for life.
  
• Let's not forget we also have more discretionary time. Not only are we saving money from not having kids, we have time to manage our money and make it grow - and that means investing time, not just money, into financial plans. Wealth comes from exercising our time & money into financial muscle.
  
• We can have better business skills. How? many of us try to offset our bad press by being the best little gay in the world, by transforming cruising into networking, by transforming street alertness into market monitoring, and by taking high-risk opportunities - in order to reap correspondingly high returns.
  
• We have more potential for entrepreneurship. And we need to, become entrepreneurial early in life before we hit that all-too-real lavender ceiling. As entrepreneurs we discover that our uniqueness & individuality add to our marketability; we find that those in power value our outside the hierarchy roles; we realize that our street smarts and our skills at crossing social boundaries all translate easily into finely-tuned customer service These advantages are to be charged for at a premium - of course.

Each of us faces the challenge of balancing our handicaps with our strengths. One way to do this is to think of yourself as a gay corporation run by a very individualistic gay board of directors. Let's place around your board table our past and future selves, a director representing each decade of your life.

• that teenager who still thinks he or she got short-changed way back when;
  
• that 20-year old wants to play catch up on sex, drugs, and alcohol and stay in the relative security of gay ghetto life;
  
• that 30-year old who knows it's time to build career, relationship, & portfolio but keeps getting distracted by increasing income and all those ads;
  
• that 40-year old who can get waylaid in a seemingly endless midlife crisis but who wants us to lead us into true individual vision;
  
• the 50-year old who is skilled & ready to bring in high income but who often has to waste optimal years playing catch up;
  
• the 60-year old who looks to the time when income is not tied to work, but who may face the drastic cutting back that should have happened early on;
  
• the 70-year old who wants us to make an e-statement with our life, but who whether we'll have the will and the means then to give back.

We need to spend more time in our financial gyms. We need do reps in risk-taking, we need to bulk up our savings; we need to bench press our careers; we need to build investment muscle; we need to spot each other in our financial decision-making; and we need to simply spend more time planning our finances.

Our goal is the freedom that's won from financial security, the competence that's won from exercising what we've got to work with, and the confidence that's won from financial control.