“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
-Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
This is where I am right now. I have a very dear aunt who is very business-minded and was fortunate enough to be an investment banker in the '80's and '90's. She's been rich for a long time and can't understand why my uncle (who runs a little food shop in the Philippines and drives the equivalent of a school bus on the side) can't ever seem to get it together. Now, this uncle works harder than anyone I know and in fact, his wife worked so hard that she thought that the pain in her neck and shoulders was nothing but work related fatigue until it turned out to be cancer. Now, I love my aunt, but she's been rich a long time, as I mentioned. She's super smart and has a deep understanding of the way her world works, but doesn't really get it when her world and the world the rest of us live in collide. Her advice to me two years ago on moving back to the U.S. was to move to NYC, because "it's really a very livable city . . . once you resolve your housing problem." Now . . . her apartment cost $1.3 million in 1998 and well . . . I'm a teacher. I'm oversimplifying of course, but still.
You know, I finished Rich Dad, Poor Dad today. It's pretty much an exercise in contradictory platitudes, but I can break the book down into a few basic tenets: - buy real estate from people who are losing their homes - spend money on real estate and stock investments, not boats - invest in real estate seminars. The "it takes money to make money" argument is paid a pretty insulting bit of lip service. It goes something like this: "pay yourself first because then your creditors will get mad at you for being behind on your bills and you'll be motivated to think of new ways to make money." In other words: need money for investing in speculative schemes? Don't pay rent! That way you'll want to strike it rich even more and your desperation will hone your drive and intellect! You wanna talk about idiotic, tone-deaf Republican bullshit... and that's what I think most wealth-accumulating moguls boil down to: "I lucked out once and leveraged the money into more money, you can, too! All you need to do is luck out!" And yes. Luck favors the prepared. And the more time you spend in the right place, the more likely it is to be the right time. But if you don't have 200 bucks to pay for a new transmission, you probably don't have $8k to invest in foreclosures. "Think and grow rich" my ass.
buy real estate from people who are losing their homes
"The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets." - Baron Rothschild
My god, he really said that? Mayer Rothschild was a fucking badass. He also said "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." I'm gonna need me a Rothschild biography. I mean - the dude makes Cornelius Vanderbilt look like George Soros.
To make it worse, a recent study showed that shift work actually decreases intelligence, which I would interpret as probably a result of exhaustion. Shift workers are literally too tired to climb the social ladder (not to mention all the financial issues from the article). We should pass laws requiring more consistency in workers' schedules as well as increasing the minimum wage dramatically. Unpredictable schedules are also p problematic because they translate to unpredictable earnings, making it impossible to plan your expenditures well.