(12-04-2023 10:49 AM)Attackcoog Wrote: (12-04-2023 09:42 AM)Eldonabe Wrote: Ummmm... simple smart financial choices:
- Don't allow you to keep up with the Joneses
- Do not help you look cool
- Give the appearance of looking like you are poor
- Take away a significant number of TikToc/Instagram/X "Look at me" posts
And thats really the key to building wealth for the vast majority of the population. One needs to cap their lifestyle in a manner that allows you to save money and NOT to live pay check to pay check. Over a lifetime, most any person makes millions----its about how much of that lifetime payout you can hold on to and how you invest it.
My father told me on my 10th birthday that I had 8 years to get ready to pay for college, and buy a car. That year I spent $75 dollars on a Sears lawnmower and started making 2 and 3 bucks a yard cutting grass. At 12 I started work in the Summers with my grandfather at one of his sawmills. I shoveled sawdust and stacked slabs. Later I graduated to stacking lumber and then cross ties, and then running the forklift to load and unload trucks and keep the mill running, as well as operating other necessary vehicles. I had to handle oil changes, filter replacements, hydraulic fluid levels, hose replacements, and other general maintenance including using a grease gun and grease nipple replacement when one was fouled.
I paid cash for my first car, cash for most of my college education, invested as I could and paid off what few student loans I had when the Hunt brothers tried to corner the market on silver.
I had a great first career in sales and in the days where draw accounts were a way of controlling tax liability in any given year. We lived within our means bought a modest home in a nice area, and never dressed in any flashy way. I was raised a utilitarian, by a child of the great depression and by grandparents who were frugal, including great grandparents who were farmers and operated a totally self sufficient farm generating their own electricity, with a well powered by a windmill to pump water into the home, and who had standard farm animals for milk and food, 17 acres in pecans, two ponds stocked with fish, and about 90 acres of land in all.
If you didn't have cash you didn't buy it. You bought what you needed and re-tasked as much of what you owned as you could if it could no longer be repaired.
Maybe I failed my daughters, but I paid their educations, with cash. We never drove a fancy car, other than the Cutlass I bought as my first car, and today I drive a long bed Pickup Truck. We drove our vehicles and kept them in repair until they literally were worn out and no longer were reliable.
One of my two best friends pitied me and my wife for not having "nice things". Well, here we are in our later years and my wife, and I are retired and living comfortably, and my buddy is still working after a triple bypass because he can't afford to stop even though they live in an upscale city neighborhood and drive fine vehicles and as the commercial says he will never retire because he is in debt up to his eyeballs. But they pity us. "Ain't that America!"
I still tithe to charities which actually spend what they take in on those in need. I have one extravagance, a really good CPA, and she is worth every penny. But we discuss the year ahead of time, and not in arrears.
We were told by my mother to spend a little on ourselves. My parents who did that will leave us very little. My daughters will be left with much more if I can go quickly and, in a way, where my dying body is not enslaved by the healthcare system. We have good insurance, but that system is a tool for the stealing of inheritances.
Hence if I get Alzheimer's my plan is to put to sea to fish and never come home. I've eaten fish all of my life, if they eat me, well that is a just and fitting ending, and no blown 15 to 20 thousand on a damned funeral. Think of all the land wasted on the dead! That's a sin too!
We are happy because we are free. What I fear is one thing. I fear my children will be enslaved by a corporately backed takeover of a free society and its government and enslaved and dictated to by greedy godless bastards who are our CEOs. And that's not just America's threat, but the worlds.
