Save before you shop: Sears brings back the Christmas Club.

Do I get to say ‘I told you so?’ In a post written nearly a year ago called WWGD — What Would Grandma Do? — I forecast the wholehearted return of those favorite financial products beloved of our grandmothers — including the layaway plan and the Christmas Club.

Now, in a move that pretty much proves my psychic abilities, retail giant Sears is encouraging consumers to save before they shop for Christmas, using their Christmas Club card. Instead of functioning like a credit card (as many store cards do) the Sears card allows users to “load” the card beforehand—just like paying money into a bank account. If they do this before November 14, card participants who join before October 31 will be entitled to a jolly reward of 3% extra to spend in Sears, Kmart and associated stores. Considering the current meager interest rates on savings accounts, before you can say ‘horsefeathers!’ Mrs. Consumer looks almost as wise as Grandma.

As for Sears, reviving the Christmas Club system just may guarantee them a share of the Christmas market in advance.

Social Lending Breakthrough:Student Loans for the Developing World.

In the wake of the resounding success of LendingClub.com, the people-powered community lending site which should soon hit the 25,000 investor mark, comes another social lending breakthrough. Now a Seattle-based foundation Vittana brings peer-to-peer benefits to students in the developing world via educational loans.

Now in beta, Vittana partners with microfinance institutions (MFIs) throughout the developing world to support the new student lending programs. Potential lenders begin by browsing through the students like Katherine who are profiled on the site. When they see one they’d like to help, they can lend as little as USD 25 toward that student’s education. Vittana’s local MFI partner—which has already verified that the students listed are hard-working and likely to succeed—then provides the full amount of that loan to the student. Once the student graduates and gets a job, he or she starts paying back that MFI partner; when the loaned funds are fully repaid, Vittana returns to the lender the full amount that was lent.

Given the chaos in the traditional banking industry, the growing popularity and increasing number of new financial products in the social lending category is a welcome trend.

Thanks to Springwise.

What are your life’s keywords?

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” –Marcel Proust

Now that we’re global in ways we could never be before, we have countless new opportunities for discovery.

Today, our voyages may be virtual or physical ones. No longer do we plod over hills heavy with our worldly goods as we seek new views. Our searches are streamlined; we move with ease through landscape after landscape via Google Earth or Virgin Atlantic.

But while new scenery may be closer at hand, many of us continue to carry an enormous burden, one that weighs us down immeasurably more than a wagon train or a backpack ever could: our perspective.

When we see the world with the same-old, same-old, it doesn’t matter that we’re gazing upon a beach in Big Sur, the majesty of a castle in Edinburgh or the blue mist over Katoomba. World-weary eyes all too often miss life’s true treasures, stumbling over them in a frenzy to get to the fool’s gold. What does it matter where you are or what you’re looking at if you only seek what you sought before? What if your search never changes –like the eternal keywords of your life?

Our beliefs then become our burden. They heavy us up with tired ideas of what’s beautiful, what’s important, what’s real. Without new perspective, we’re destined to be trapped in our own list of stale keywords.

Our country needs a new list of keywords, too. But that’s a rant for another day.

My wish for you: May your eyes be refreshed . . . and your soul replenished.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Some of you may remember this. We wore it on T-shirts, hung it on walls, intoned it during smokey midnight conversations in college dorms.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

I have no idea who wrote this mantra. I can’t remember it ever being attributed to anyone. It was one of those catch phrases that merely appeared, spontaneously generated by the age of Aquarius, hours of Dylan, and the legions of students who fervently needed to believe that each moment held its own fresh start.

Too many of us have let go of this idea. In the rush of mortgages and jobs and marriages good and bad we have lost that start-over feeling. Our hurts and mistakes pile up and overwhelm us. We etch ourselves with indelible labels. We are branded with a backlog of our own making.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Simple, so simple. Yet your body already knows this. Every breath is new, every cell is spinning its way into new life even as you read these words. Your mind and your spirit needs to accept what is already a piece of biological reality.

So today, whether you were a child of the seventies or not, remember these words. What you did yesterday you need not do today. What you felt yesterday you need not feel today. In this age of ever-emerging technology, with the promise of so much, nothing needs to be a re-run. Not your life, your actions, your spirit.

Your life is all new, all the time.

Are You Thankful for the Wrong People?

You know, so often we thank the wrong people. For some odd reason, we think only folks who are nice to us should be thanked. So we completely overlook an all too significant group, a group that may very well be responsible for much of the progress in the world: the ass-kickers.

“Remember that a kick in the ass is a step forward.”

When someone gives you a swift kick, it zaps you right off the dime. However comfy you were on that keister of yours, you go flying off it into a whole new place. From this new vantage point, the world looks different. So you muster up enough steam to squawk: “Hey, wait a second there! I’m not gonna put up with that! I’ll show you! I’m gonna ____!” And invariably, whatever it is you’re gonna do to ’show them’ is legions better than where you were before. At least now you’re moving.

Now ass-kickers are not nice. The world certainly doesn’t need any more of them, and even American Greetings might not get a National Ass-Kickers Day off the drawing boards. But they do serve a purpose. By behaving badly, they remind you sharply of your own beliefs about right and wrong. For many of us, this is enough to kick us out of neutral and into high gear.

Action. That’s what a swift kick is all about. And that’s why the ass-kickers in our lives deserve to be at the very top of our Christmas lists every year. Would you have taken that very productive next step without them? Would you have moved this swiftly along your path towards greater happiness without a big assist from your local AK?

It looks like I’ll be writing a lot of thank yous this weekend.